Egypt: Gift of the Nile. Sudan - Irony.

Imagine differing to a colonial era treaty, by a country opposed to anything Western and engaged in behavior contrary to Western principles, suddenly shaking a 1929 document about as authority.  Ironic.





Nile River row: Could it turn violent?


Jul 7, 2010 08:59 EDT
Reuters


The giggles started when the seventh journalist in a row said that his question was for Egypt’s water and irrigation minister, Mohamed Nasreddin Allam.

The non-Egyptian media gave him a bit of a hammering at last week’s talks in Addis Ababa for the nine countries that the Nile passes through.

Allam bared his teeth when a Kenyan journalist accused him of hiding behind “colonial-era treaties” giving his country the brunt of the river’s vital waters whether that hurt the poorer upstream countries or not.

“You obviously don’t know enough about this subject to be asking questions about it,” he snapped before later apologising to her with a kiss on the cheek.

Five of the nine Nile countries — Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya — last month signed a deal to share the water that is a crucial resource for all of them. But Egypt and Sudan, who are entitled to most of the water and can veto upstream dams under a 1929 British-brokered agreement, refused.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi have not signed yet either and analysts are divided on whether they will or not. Six Nile countries must sign the agreement for it to have any power but Egypt says even that wouldn’t change its mind. The five signatories — some of the world’s poorest countries — have left the agreement open for debating and possible signing for up to a year.

Tensions were clearly still running high after two days of negotiations in Addis and despite grinning around the table and constantly referring to each other as “my brother”, the ministers always seemed in danger of breaking into bickering.

When the Sudanese water minister said his country was freezing cooperation with the Nile Basin Initiative — the name given to the ten-year effort to agree on how to manage the river — Ethiopia’s water minister loudly protested to the media that his Sudanese colleague had not revealed that during their private meetings.

Highlighting the seriousness of the issue, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit and International Cooperation Minister Fayza Abul Naga, arrived in Addis Ababaon Wednesday to again meet Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

It’s no surprise that the spat is getting a lot of press in both Ethiopia and Egypt.

“Egypt is a gift of the Nile,” people like to say in a country that worshipped the river as a God in ancient times. “If Egypt is a gift of the Nile, then the Nile is a gift of Ethiopia,” Ethiopians shoot back with growing confidence.

And they have a point. More than 85 percent of the waters originate in Ethiopia, which relies on foreign aid for survival and sees hydropower dams as a potential cash cow and central to its plans to become one of Africa’s only power exporters.

But Egypt is not for turning. Almost totally dependent on the Nile for its agricultural output (a third of its economy) and already worried about climate change, it is determined to hold onto its 55.5 billion cubic metres of water a year, a seemingly unfair share of the Nile’s total flow of 84 billion cubic metres.

The Egyptians point out that they don’t benefit from rains like the upstream countries. Everybody, it seems, has valid points. Nobody is budging. Now some regional analysts are even saying the row could turn into the world’s first major water war and similar thoughts are being expressed in cafes from Cairo all the way upriver to Dar es Salaam.

So what next? The nine countries are due to meet again in Nairobi sometime between September and November. But where is the way forward? Who will blink first? And who really should? Could this bickering turn violent?

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
water

Water: We are Running Out.

Circus entrepreneur Guy Laliberte, who founded the Cirque du Soleil theatre company in the 1980s, has become the first clown to go into orbit. He reportedly paid $35 million for his spot on the Soyuz TM-16 spacecraft, which will take him to the International Space Station for a 12-day stay. Laliberte undertook this mission to publicize the world's growing shortage of clean water. He is the seventh paying space tourist to travel to the ISS.


For $11 million, Laliberte could have provided the resources to any number of countries or people to provide them with the tools to provide water, for decades (or longer) to come.  The resource - desalination plant, and in Africa, where water is in demand, this would have helped.  For $35 million, I am quite sure the builders could have done three, in select locations providing water where none was previously available.

And his home country has more water than they know what to do with - it is incomprehensible the amount of water, and the level of their water tables in the northern areas of their provinces.  Enough to satisfy all the demands of North America for centuries.

That would leave us with the energy and drive to provide the technology and resources for Africa to satisfy their water demands.

It is with technology that we will provide the water and needs for the people who today do without.  Hinder our ability to excel in technology, and hurt the people.

It also wouldn't hurt if we cut back a little on our water usage.  Easy enough to do. 

Ensure all washing is done on full loads and not smaller loads using more water.  Water your lawns for several fewer minutes each time you water, take shorter showers by a few minutes each time ... and amazingly, we will use less water.









water

Water? Pay the Bill or Else.

99-Year-Old's Water Bill Jumps Almost 4000% WASA: 139,876 gallons went into Northwest house

By MATTHEW STABLEY
Updated 2:41 PM EDT, Fri, Jun 19, 2009


WASHINGTON -- Stop complaining about your utility bills. Jeannette Cohen's water bill jumped almost 4000 percent.

The 99-year-old northwest Washington woman insists it must be a mistake. Usually, her water bill is $30. In March, she did a double take.

"I got my usual bill and opened the envelope and looked at the amount," she said. "Huh? I looked again."

It was $1,181.

Cohen complained and had plumbers check her house twice. Usually, she uses about 3,000 gallons of water per month. D.C. Water and Sewer Authority's records show that 139,876 gallons went into her house that month, and they insist she must pay for them.

*********************************

In addition to the obvious - we can learn from this one small detail. At the very minimum, we use 3,000 gallons per month per person. I am quite sure Ms Cohen does not take 15 minute showers.

X 10,000 people into California each month X ....






water

Water Rationing and Villaraigosa

Mr. Villaraigosa,

I am willing to go through one summer watering my lawn twice a week, in fact, we could get away with watering it ONCE a week ... IF ... IF you send out your crews to adjust school lawns to STOP with the automatic sprinklers when it rains, IF you turn off the shrubbery watering along freeways and have it come on ONCE a week, IF you use some of the city funds in conjunction with county and state funds to BUILD new water reservoirs.

This past rainy season we received on the very low end, about 8 inches of rain. In the hills above the Valley, over 14 inches. What isn't absorbed into the water table is run off and goes to the ocean. We have not built a new water reservoir in decades. Yet millions of new occupants reside in Los Angeles using hundreds of gallons a week, each. Think if we had more water reservoirs around the county, even a few within the city, or the state - think how much less serious this would all be if we made use of the water that falls on us.





Los Angeles restricts lawn watering to 2 days a week
Associated Press
06/01/2009

LOS ANGELES — It's now illegal to water lawns in the nation's second-largest city on any day other than Mondays and Thursdays.

New mandatory water conservation rules went into effect today in Los Angeles as the city faces a water supply shortage for a third consecutive year.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power says the city gets most of its water from elsewhere in the state and those supplies are being limited by drought and regulatory restrictions.

The department is also reducing by 15 percent the amount of water that customers can purchase at the lowest rate, known as Tier 1. Customers who don't cut usage by 15 percent will be charged at a higher rate for every gallon over their Tier 1 allotment.







water

California: We have no water, Now Leave.

Coupled with the article about Vegas and water ...

If I have replaced several water fixtures and use 10-15% less, rarely water my grass (what I have of it), and if all the schools have changed to waterless urinals 9save 40,000 gallons per year each - they say - I have to ask, why, if we are saving millions of gallons, are we still running out, if - the water issue is similar to last year and the year before, why are we not doing better than last year and the year before PLUS we do have more water than last year due to the snowfall and rains this year ... so where is all the water going!!!

I only ask it half seriously because I know where it is going and that is the issue never discussed. Instead, we call it a drought and an emergency and ... and we ignore the larger issue.





Schwarzenegger declares Calif. drought emergency

By SAMANTHA YOUNG –
February 27, 2009

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency Friday because of three years of below-average rain and snowfall in California, a step that urges urban water agencies to reduce water use by 20 percent.

"This drought is having a devastating impact on our people, our communities, our economy and our environment, making today's action absolutely necessary," the Republican governor said in his statement.

Mandatory rationing is an option if the declaration and other measures are insufficient.

The drought has forced farmers to fallow their fields, put thousands of agricultural workers out of work and led to conservation measures in cities throughout the state, which is the nation's top agricultural producer.

Agriculture losses could reach $2.8 billion this year and cost 95,000 jobs, said Lester Snow, the state water director.

State agencies must now provide assistance for affected communities and businesses and the Department of Water Resources must protect supplies, all accompanied by a statewide conservation campaign.

Three dry winters have left California's state- and federally operated reservoirs at their lowest levels since 1992.

Federal water managers announced last week that they would not deliver any water this year to thousands of California farms, although that could change if conditions improve. The state has said it probably would deliver just 15 percent of the water contractors have requested this year.

Schwarzenegger declared a statewide drought in June but stopped short of calling a state of emergency. His 2008 executive order directed the state Department of Water Resources to speed water transfers to areas with the worst shortages and help local water districts with conservation efforts.

Over the last few weeks, storms have helped bring the seasons' rain totals to 87 percent of average, but the Sierra snowpack remains at 78 percent of normal for this time of year. State hydrologists say the snowpack must reach between 120 to 130 percent of normal to make up for the two previous dry winters and replenish California's key reservoirs.

Court decisions intended to protect threatened fish species also have forced a significant cutback in pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, the heart of the state's delivery system.

The governor, farmers and lawmakers have argued for years that California must upgrade its decades-old water supply and delivery system and build new reservoirs.

"The situation is extremely dire," said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, adding that the governor's action Friday "underscores the urgency of serving the long-term structural problems."

The state delivers water to more than 25 million Californians and more than 750,000 acres of farmland.

Schwarzenegger's order leaves the door open for more severe restrictions later. Additional measures can include mandatory water rationing and water reductions if there is no improvement in water reserves and residents fail to conserve on their own.

At least 25 water agencies throughout the state already have imposed mandatory restrictions, while 66 others have voluntary measures in place.

The state prefers such local efforts so it does not have to call for statewide rationing, Snow said.
The federal government on Thursday created a drought task force to provide farmers technical assistance in managing existing water supplies. Farmers also could be eligible for federally-backed emergency loans.

Almond farmer Shawn Coburn of Mendota said the emergency declaration comes too late for many growers who already are halfway through the season. Some farmers didn't bring in bees to pollinate, while others sprayed their orchards with chemicals that keep nuts from forming.

"It's too late," he said. "It's going to sound horrible coming from a farmer because you never turn down help, but come on, this thing is over with."






California

WATER

Las Vegas Running Out of Water Means Dimming Los Angeles Lights
By John Lippert and Jim Efstathiou Jr.

Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) -- On a cloudless December day in the Nevada desert, workers in white hard hats descend into a 30- foot-wide shaft next to Lake Mead.

As they’ve been doing since June, they’ll blast and dig straight down into the limestone surrounding the reservoir that supplies 90 percent of Las Vegas’s water. In September, when they hit 600 feet, they’ll turn and burrow for 3 miles, laying a new pipe as they go.

The crew is in a hurry. They’re battling the worst 10-year drought in recorded history along the Colorado River, which feeds the 110-mile-long reservoir. Since 1999, Lake Mead has dropped about 1 percent a year. By 2012, the lake’s surface could fall below the existing pipe that delivers 40 percent of the city’s water.

As Las Vegas’s economy worsens, the workers are also racing against a recession that threatens the ability to sell $500 million in bonds so they can complete the job.

Patricia Mulroy, manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, is the general in this region’s war to stem a water emergency that’s playing out worldwide. It’s the biggest battle of her 31-year career.

‘We’ve Tried Everything’

“We’ve tried everything,” says Mulroy, 56, who made no secret of her desire to become secretary of the U.S. Interior Department before President Barack Obama picked U.S. Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado in December.

“The way you look at water has to fundamentally change,” adds Mulroy, who, after 20 years of running the authority, said in January she’s ready to start thinking about looking for a new job, declining to say where.

Across the planet, people like Mulroy are struggling to solve the next global crisis.

From 2500 B.C., when King Urlama of Lagash diverted water in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley in a border dispute with nearby Umma, to 1924, when Owens Valley, California, farmers blew up part of the aqueduct that served a parched Los Angeles, societies have bargained, fought and rearranged geographies to get the water they need.

Mulroy started her push with conservation. She’s paying homeowners $1.50 a square foot (0.09 square meter) to replace lawns with gravel and asking golf courses to dig up turf. That helped cut Las Vegas’s water use by 19.4 percent in the seven years ended in 2008, even as the metropolitan area added 482,000 people, bringing the total to 2 million. It wasn’t enough.

Paul Bunyan

So she’s planning a $3.5 billion, 327-mile (525-kilometer) underground pipeline to tap aquifers beneath cattle-raising valleys northeast of the city. She’s even suggested refashioning the plumbing of the entire continent, Paul Bunyan style, by diverting floodwaters from the Mississippi River west toward the Rocky Mountains.

If Mulroy’s ideas are extreme, one reason is that the planet’s most essential resource doesn’t work like other commodities.

There’s no global marketplace for water. Deals for property, wells and water rights, such as the ones Mulroy must negotiate to build the pipeline, are done piecemeal. As the world grows needier, neither governments nor companies nor investors have figured out an effective and sustainable response.

“We have 19th-century ways of utilizing water and 21st- century needs,” says Brad Udall, director of Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Unyielding Pressure

Water upheavals are intensifying because the population is growing fastest in places where fresh water is either scarce or polluted. Dry areas are becoming drier and wet areas wetter as the oceans and atmosphere warm. Economic roadblocks, such as the global credit crunch and its effects on Mulroy’s attempts to sell bonds, multiply during a recession.

Yet local governments that control water face unyielding pressure from constituents to keep the price low, regardless of cost. Agricultural interests, commercial developers and the housing industry clash over dwindling supplies. Companies, burdened by slowing profits, will be forced to move from dry areas such as the American Southwest, Udall says.

“Water is going to be more important than oil in the next 20 years,” says Dipak Jain, dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who studies why corporations locate where they do.

No Cheap Water

Even before the now decade-long drought began punishing Las Vegas, people used more than 75 percent of the water in northern Africa and western Asia that they could get their hands on in 2000, according to the United Nations.

In 2002, 8 percent of the world suffered chronic shortages. By 2050, 40 percent of the projected world population, or about 4 billion people, will lack adequate water as entire regions turn dry, the UN predicts.

“We can no longer assume that cheap water is available,” says Peter Gleick, editor of The World’s Water 2008-2009 (Island Press, 2009). “We have to start living within our means.”
Over the Sierra Mountains from Las Vegas, Shasta Lake, California’s biggest reservoir, is less than a third full because melting snow that fed it for six decades is dwindling. A winter as dry as the previous two may mean rationing for 18 million people in Southern California this year, says Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District.

Across the Pacific Ocean, wildfires fueled by a 10-year drought and fanned by 60-mile-per-hour winds around Melbourne killed more than 200 people in February.

Developing Giants

In Asia, developing giants are battling pollution as their populations grow. China, home to 21 percent of the world’s people last year, has just 7 percent of the water. Nine in 10 Chinese-city groundwater systems are fouled by industrial toxins, pesticides and human waste, says Maude Barlow, the first senior adviser on water to the UN and author of “Blue Covenant” (New Press, 2007).

In India, with 1.2 billion people, three-quarters of the surface water is contaminated, that country’s government said in September.

In the Mideast, where the Dead Sea is dropping 3 feet (1 meter) a year, Israel, Jordan and Syria are diverting water upstream from the Jordan River. That’s adding another source of discord to an already volatile region.

‘Gambling, Gluttony and Girls’

“There’s a growing risk of conflict over water shared by nations, ethnic groups or economic interests,” Gleick says.

Las Vegas, an adult-entertainment haven carved into the Mojave Desert, may not draw much sympathy as a poster child for water emergencies.

For decades, new residents imported their cravings for lawns, sprinklers, pools and golf courses to a region that receives 4 inches (10 centimeters) of rain a year, about 1/10 of what Chicago enjoys. Casinos and hotels with water slides and river rides sucked up limited groundwater.

Until the real estate meltdown, Nevada was the fastest- growing U.S. market, with a 33 percent surge in new homes from 2000 to ‘07.

Now the city is getting a dose of reality, says Cecil Garland, a rancher in neighboring Utah who opposes Mulroy’s groundwater pipeline.

“Las Vegas is a place of gambling, gluttony and girls,” Garland, 83, says.

He says there’s no extra water along the proposed route, which travels through valleys green with 3-foot-tall shrubs called greasewood. If pumping kills the greasewood, dust storms that plague his town of Callao would soar 5,000 feet into the sky, he says.
‘Driest Areas’
“We live in one of the driest areas of the driest part of the U.S.,” Garland says. “How in the world can anybody with reason or common sense think they can pump water in the amount they’re talking about and leave the integrity of the valley in place?”

Mulroy says Nevada’s resorts use 3 percent of the state’s water compared with 90 percent going for farms and ranches.

For the past two decades, Mulroy, a lifelong government employee whose business attire tends toward pantsuits with the collar of her blouses pointed up behind her neck, has wrestled with the competing truths that dog all water managers: There’s only so much to go around, somebody has already claimed most of it, and citizens and companies keep demanding more.

“People view water as a human right and expect it to be virtually free,” says Michael LoCascio at Boston-based Lux Research Inc., which analyzes water issues. “Governments respond to that, and you end up with inefficiency.”

Without price-setting markets, water that cost 33 cents a cubic meter for the first 15 cubic meters delivered to homes in Memphis, Tennessee, in June 2007 was $3.01 in Atlanta and 57 cents in Las Vegas.

That’s cheap compared with Copenhagen, where the same amount that month was $7.71 per cubic meter, Gleick says.

Human Survival

Robert Glennon, a University of Arizona law professor, says governments must provide enough water for human survival. Beyond that, only freely functioning markets can allot it to people who need it most, he says.

Fast-growing cities should buy from farmers who use water on marginal land, says Glennon, author of “Unquenchable” (Island Press, 2009). That would cut inefficiency caused by irrigating deserts, such as those around Las Vegas, to raise alfalfa or beef, he says.

Worldwide, about 60 percent of fresh water goes to irrigate crops through flooding, losing 70 percent of the moisture to evaporation, Lux Research says.

Rudimentary Markets

The rudiments of water markets are cropping up across the American West.

In 2005, after 19 years of negotiations, Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Water District signed a 35-year “dry year option” with the Palo Verde Irrigation District south of Las Vegas in California. Los Angeles pays 7,000 farmers to leave land fallow during droughts and ship their water to city residents. The city gives a one-time payment of $3,170 an acre (0.4 hectare) to farmers who sign up and then $630 per year for every acre not farmed.

Companies and investors that see moneymaking opportunities in strategies to quench the world’s thirst may draw lessons from corporations that have tried.

In October, General Electric Co. named the third head of its water unit in three years. GE had paid $3.8 billion to buy several treatment and filtration companies, including Watertown, Massachusetts-based Ionics Inc., which makes reverse-osmosis membranes for purifying salt water.

Big Deals

Last year, GE opened a $250 million desalination plant, Africa’s largest, with state-owned Algerian Energy Co. GE had hoped to profit from its newly acquired water technologies with the backing of its General Electric Capital Corp. financing arm, says Jeffrey Fulgham, chief marketing officer for the Trevose, Pennsylvania-based unit. Instead, GE wound up footing a lot of the building work for the plant, he says.

“At the end of these big hardware deals, there isn’t much profit,” says Fulgham, who adds that GE now focuses on water technology and avoids construction.

Pure Cycle Corp., which buys and transports water for housing developments near Denver, seemed to have scored a windfall. Starting in 1976, it paid $110 million for water rights valued at $4 billion last year, Chief Executive Officer Mark Harding says. Yet shares in the Thornton, Colorado, company tumbled by 47 percent during the six months ended on Feb. 25. to trade at $3.25 apiece.

The real estate slowdown convinced investors that profits from water rights may be years away, Harding says.

Just financing water for municipal use is getting harder in the global recession.

$8.3 Billion

The southern Nevada authority is about halfway through a 30-year, $8.3 billion construction campaign. Last year, 57 percent of the money for it came from a $6,310 fee to hook up new homes. The Las Vegas real estate slump is so severe that total hookup collections dropped to $61.5 million last year from $188.4 million in 2006. Mulroy says the authority actually lost money on hookups in January because of refunds to developers who abandoned construction projects.

As a result, reserves in the construction fund dropped 6 percent in the first six weeks of 2009, to $480 million. Without those reserves, Mulroy says, she couldn’t assure investors the authority would be able to repay the $500 million in bonds she plans to start selling by early fall to complete the Lake Mead project. The authority had $3.9 billion in liabilities on June 30.

‘Rub Two Sticks Together’

The authority also gets money from water deliveries, property taxes and fees from federal land sales. If she has to protect the reserves, Mulroy says, she’ll raise water rates, which total about $21 a month for a single-family home.

She’s asked fellow Nevadan Harry Reid, the U.S. Senate majority leader, for a federal guarantee on the bonds. Reid is exploring how to help big municipal water systems, including Mulroy’s, get easier access to credit, spokesman Jon Summers says.

In February, Mulroy presented such a dire description of the authority’s finances to the Nevada legislature that Jerry Claborn, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, told her, “You’ll have to do like you did years ago: rub two sticks together.”

Mulroy said afterward she wanted to quash any notion that cash-strapped legislators could appropriate her reserves for some other purpose.

To Richard Bunker, who hired her as an administrative assistant when he managed Clark County, Nevada, in 1978, Mulroy’s hardball tactics are a delight.

“She walks into a room with guys who’ve been on the river 50 and 60 years and they just cringe,” he says with a smile.

‘Pay Me Enough’

One thing Mulroy has ruled out, even in the economic meltdown, is using water as an excuse to limit Las Vegas’s growth.

“During the next 50 years, this country’s population is expected to explode by another 140 million,” she says, citing U.S. Census projections. “I always ask, ‘Where do you want the people to go?’”

Mulroy also opposes the idea of privatizing water, or giving investors power to set prices.
“You’d be telling people, ‘Pay me enough or I withhold it,’” she says, her voice rising, in the cafeteria of Clark County’s terra cotta-colored municipal headquarters. “It’s like you’re telling me I can live.”

Mulroy’s unflagging commitment to keeping Las Vegas green and growing gets the blessing of casino owner Stephen Wynn.

“Pat is the best public servant I’ve met in my 40 years on the Strip,” says Wynn, who credits her with teaching him to save money by using treated groundwater for the lagoons surrounding the artificial volcano at the Mirage hotel, now owned by MGM Mirage.

Lake Mead

Finding the water for casinos is one reason crews are working around the clock at Lake Mead.
In 2002 alone, lack of rainfall lowered the deep-blue waters by 24.6 feet, leaving white bathtub-ring-like marks on the brown cliffs and stranding docks half a mile from shore.

Today, the lake is 1,112 feet above sea level. Should it fall to 1,075 feet, the federal government would cut the water to seven states that depend on the Colorado River, according to an agreement they all signed in 2007. If that happens, the states would likely renegotiate a 1922 pact that divided up the river’s water rights in the first place, Mulroy says. Mexico’s allocation under a 1944 treaty could also change.

If the drought persists and more water is diverted from the Colorado, the lake could drop to 1,050 feet. That would prevent water from flowing into the intake pipe and cut 40 percent of Las Vegas’s supply -- the disaster Mulroy is trying to head off. Hoover Dam, completed in 1935 to regulate the river and form Lake Mead, wouldn’t be able to produce electricity for the 750,000 people it supplies in Los Angeles.

No More Water

At 1,000 feet, the remaining intakes and the rest of the Lake Mead water would go. Because of climate change and population growth, chances of this are as great as 50 percent by 2026, the University of Colorado’s Udall says.

When Mulroy, a daughter of a civilian employee of the U.S. Air Force, arrived in Las Vegas in 1974, the city had yet to be consumed by a water quest. Until the 1940s, parts of downtown had freely flowing springs.

Mulroy, a native of Germany, studied German literature; got her master’s degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and went to work for Bunker at Clark County. A Mormon bishop, he later ran the state’s Gaming Control Board and the Nevada Resort Association.

Shoeboxes

Bunker supported her promotion to administrator for the county justice court, which was storing records in shoeboxes when she took over. In 1989, he backed her as general manager of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, which the state legislature had formed four decades earlier. Mulroy helped create the seven- community Southern Nevada Water Authority two years later.

“Absent her being here, I don’t know where we’d be,” Bunker says.

Around the time Mulroy became water czar, Wynn unleashed the era of Wall Street-financed megaresorts with his 30-story Mirage. He tinted the hotel’s windows with real gold.

Mulroy raced to boost water deliveries throughout the city by as much as 20 percent a year. With Bunker’s help, she started planning the pipeline to tap melting snow under Wheeler Peak, Nevada’s second-highest mountain.

The pipeline’s planned path runs northeast out of Las Vegas, enters Lincoln County and passes through the Pahranagat National Wildlife Refuge, where, in December, gold leaves of cottonwoods shimmer and migratory birds swoop onto lakes fed by artesian springs. Farther north, hilltops are dotted with abandoned mining towns and bands of wild horses.

‘Already Spoken For’

As Mulroy marched north to secure land and permits, she ran headfirst into what Gleick says is a fundamental truth about water across the U.S. and other parts of the world.

“Nearly every drop is already spoken for, often more than once,” he says.

Determined to get what she required, Mulroy went into horse-trading mode.

“You need a large amount of money and some very powerful people to make water projects happen,” says Greg James, a California water rights attorney and a consultant for pipeline opponents.

She struck a deal with Harvey Whittemore, then Nevada’s top gambling lobbyist. Members of Whittemore’s law firm include Rory Reid, Harry Reid’s son. The younger Reid later served as the water authority’s vice chairman, from 2003 to ‘08.

120,000 New Homes

Whittemore, 56, is also a developer who’s planning a new suburb called Coyote Springs, 55 miles north of the Las Vegas Strip. Even with the real estate crash, Coyote Springs will have 120,000 homes and a dozen golf courses when it’s finished in four or five decades, he says.

Whittemore’s land included one of the most productive wells ever drilled in southern Nevada. He sold 9,000 acre-feet of groundwater that he wasn’t using to Mulroy for $30.1 million. (One acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons, or 1,240 kiloliters, enough for two average U.S. homes for a year.) That led to what Mulroy describes as a partnership in which Whittemore will help pay for the pipeline and use it to ship water to Coyote Springs.

In 2003, Mulroy bargained with reluctant officials in neighboring Lincoln County, persuading them to drop opposition to the project by ceding back to them some of the water rights that she held.

In 2006, farther up the route, she learned how tough the water business can be. She paid $22 million for a ranch that had cost $4.5 million six years earlier. The seller, Carson City, Nevada-based Vidler Water Co., a unit of PICO Holdings Inc., based the price on similar purchases Whittemore had made, Vidler President Dorothy Timian-Palmer says.

Fight Over Greasewood

Last year, Mulroy got into a fight over greasewood with Tim Durbin, a hydrologist who’d once been a consultant for her. Durbin disputed Mulroy’s assessment that the pipeline would avoid major damage to the shrub. In his rebuttal, Durbin described a scene that still touches an open wound in the psyche of the American West.

In 1913, William Mulholland built a 223-mile aqueduct from Owens Valley in California’s Sierras to Los Angeles, where he was water superintendent. The aqueduct drained a 40-foot-deep lake, exposing the valley floor and unleashing dust storms that plagued Los Angeles throughout the 20th century. The aqueduct also inspired the 1974 movie “Chinatown.” In 1970, Los Angeles built a second aqueduct.

‘A Model’

Today, the valley’s 75-mile-long expanse looks like it did a millennium ago. The water diverted to Los Angeles makes economic development in the valley impossible.

“Because of groundwater pumping, vegetation was disappearing in the Owens Valley,” says Durbin, who was chief hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in California and Nevada before becoming a private consultant in 1984. “It’s a model for what one would expect in eastern Nevada.”

Because of such memories, Mulroy hasn’t won many friends among eastern Nevada’s old-timers.

Rancher Dean Baker fears Mulroy’s pipeline would drain the water that’s let him survive in Snake Valley, in the shadow of Wheeler Peak, for more than half a century.

Baker, 69, remembers when people staked uranium claims only to realize their Geiger counters were clicking because of residue from atomic tests outside Las Vegas. He recalls flying solo in a Piper J-3 Cub before he could drive.

Most of all, Baker remembers water. He rose at dawn to deliver it to cattle 50 miles away. He culled his herd and watched greasewood wither during droughts. It took 20 years for him to afford a backhoe with a jackhammer that could break rocks that covered a spring on his ranch.

Legacy of Dust

“Water is the limiting factor in everything we do,” Baker says. “The legacy of this pipeline will be dust.”

Baker says people who want to move to Las Vegas should look instead to Mississippi and Louisiana. “People should go where there’s water,” he says.

Mulroy says her job is to bring water to the people. Last year, she said she thought the proposed pipeline could begin transporting water in 2015. Now, because of the recession, she doesn’t know when she’ll have the money to build it.

She says she’ll wait for the economy to recover to decide -- unless Lake Mead drops even more and forces her to act.

Mulroy’s struggle to get water to a growing desert population wouldn’t have surprised John Wesley Powell, the first known explorer to pass through the entire Grand Canyon 130 miles east of Las Vegas.

“You are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over the water rights,” he told the International Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles in 1893. “There is no sufficient water to supply the land.”

‘Little Bubbles’

Four generations later, Mulroy is a veteran of these age- old conflicts. She says the region’s water emergency is becoming more dangerous because of climate change and population growth. The crisis is too big to be solved one river or one continent at a time, she says.

“We’ve managed water in such small, incremental units,” she says. “We won’t be able to survive in our little bubbles.”

Even people who agree with Mulroy’s warning won’t have an easy time acting on it. As she has, they’ll discover the effort it will take to quench the world’s thirst and realize that the time and money to do so -- like water itself -- are running short.









wATER

Los Angeles is running out of water.

Of course there are no implications for people moving here, thousands, millions. No costs. No problems. After all, everyone else came here - everyone else should also be able to.

There are limits, and we have now reached, what appears to be the point at which we have no more resources. The next step will be rationing.

Imagine world response to that: The US rations water or electricity or ...





LA Mayor moves to limit water use and punish violators


12:27 PM, February 9, 2009


Calling the ongoing three-year drought a crisis, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today called for severe water-use restrictions and a tiered rate system that would reward customers who conserve and punish those who don’t with higher bills.

Lawn watering would be restricted to two days a week, Mondays and Thursdays, and could be cut to one day a week by summer if the drought continues, Villaraigosa said. The mayor made his announcement on a rainy winter day, but L.A.'s current wet weather is not expected to ease the drought. Restrictions could be imposed as early as March but would have to be approved by the City Council and commissioners at the city's Department of Water and Power.

The increased conservation measures are proposed because the Metropolitan Water District, a major wholesale water supplier to Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California, has warned that the worsening drought may force it to cut water deliveries by 15% to 25%.

“We’re headed into a crisis that we have not seen in decades," Villaraigosa said at a morning news conference in City Hall.

How much would water abuse cost residents?

The mayor urged the DWP to approve “shortage-year" rates, a tiered pricing system that encourages customers to conserve by charging more for water as usage increases. Customers who meet the city’s conservation targets would not see their bills increase -- and could even pay less -- the mayor said.

It will be up to the DWP’s board to set those conservation targets, and the price increases embedded in the proposed shortage-year rates, when it meets later this month. Customers could be asked to cut their water consumption by an additional 8% to 15%, or face steeper water rates if they do not.

Statewide, reservoir levels are at their lowest levels since the 1976-79 drought. The Eastern Sierra snowpack, a major source of water for the city, is also 71% of normal. Water that Southern California receives from the Colorado River Aqueduct and State Water Project also have fallen sharply, all of which is “grim news" to water users in Los Angeles, said DWP General Manager H. David Nahai.












water

Fires, Floods, and Idiots

I have no article this time to link, but I was thinking about something on the way home from a drive to the beach earlier today. I live where I live, they live at the beach. I have a smaller mortgage, they have a bigger mortgage. I make less, they make more. The fires come over the hills toward my community, I have a freeway in between and will never face the wrath of fire or floods where I live. yet for the select few who can live in areas prone to 'water damage' and 'fire damage' I am left wondering - why do I have to pay (taxes) to fix your community when it falls down. I understand it is not all paid by the taxpayers of California, in fact, the American taxpayers are often called upon to shoulder some of the burden. The first parts are all insurance or private self-funded, but it's the part that involves my taxes that bug me. If I drive down to that area where I am not allowed to wander and it is no lost colony I am referring to, I can't go there ... someone will stop me. If I walk on the beach the big hissy will come out and call the sheriff or his sister Babs will scream hysterically at the mere footprints upon their sand of me, a mere interloper.

Why then should I care whether all their homes burn down or are washed away by the great flood of XX?

I think the people of a few beach communities need better PR because if I lose interest in paying that means 90% have already lost interest.

I'd rather keep the place around a little longer, at least until the oceans rise and we have an underwater city. I like snorkeling, and Babs can't swim and neither can the big hissy.