The Big Thirst: Chapters 3–4

Visitors stand transfixed by the waves coursing along the face of the wall, as if watching waves break onto a beach.

In the way that only Las Vegas can, it has created a whole new category—ostentatious water.

Patricia Mulroy had already been head of all water in metropolitan Las Vegas for thirteen years, she had faced down the casino moguls and the real estate developers, she had outmaneuvered, and lassoed, the West’s water bureaucrats with the speed and agility of a cowgirl, and she had applied both imagination and blunt force to getting Las Vegans to use less water.

“You start turning those water features off, and it will have an effect on visitors. You might be able to turn off that pathetic little fire hose in front of [the casino] New York New York, but you turn around and you dry up the canals in the Venetian, and you watch occupancy drop. How do you discern what’s a good water feature from a bad water feature?”

In those days, the Las Vegas metro area had seven separate water utilities, and a “use it or lose it” division of the available water, in which every municipality needed to use up its allocation of water every year or run the risk of having the allocation reduced. “There was every disincentive to conservation,” says Mulroy.

Residents and businesses watered their lawns with a casual profligacy that was described in a New York Times story from a year after Mulroy took over. “Sprinklers send small rivers of water into the gutters daily all over Las Vegas,” wrote Robert Reinhold.

If Mulroy was originally reluctant to take on the general manager’s job, there was nothing tentative about her command of it from the very start.

It was the opening salvo in an effort to change the attitude about the availability of water, the use of water, and the cost of water.

What was for Mulroy a savvy—and totally legal—strategy for securing new water for her thirsty city looked to the rural counties like water theft.

That effort to find new water, in the first year of Mulroy’s tenure, is still being fought.

We’re creating virtual realities that are no different than Cinderella’s Castle at Disney World. And when it’s 118 degrees outside, water becomes an integral part of that.

Developers must either use wells from their own property, the rights and permits for which date back before the modern era, or they must use treated wastewater, or they must offset their water features with bigger water savings elsewhere, like the banks and shopping centers.

“We’ve taken ourselves off the potable water grid,” says Rohret, on a walking tour of Angel Park on a morning in May. “Everything you see in terms of water use is reclaimed water. It’s tertiary treatment, clean enough that you could bathe in it.”

In other places, like the fourth hole of Angel Park’s Mountain course, the patches of stark, arid landscape in the midst of golf holes take some getting used to.

The shot from the tee to the green now crosses a shallow desert canyon, an arroyo, where there had previously been a “water feature,” a lake holding millions of gallons of water.

The Senate vote, to establish a commission to redraw the boundary—states can’t, of course, unilaterally change their boundaries—was unanimous; the bill was signed by Governor Sonny Perdue.

They may be in trouble, but it’s not because they don’t realize how precarious their supply of water is.

And where Las Vegas’s challenges come mostly from the struggle to sustain a metropolis in a desert, Atlanta’s troubles spring from a much more universal problem: water complacency.

The Chattahoochee’s reassuring presence—along with an average of 50 inches of rain a year, ten times what Las Vegas gets—has always made Atlanta rather blithe about its water supply.

Fifty years later, when that prolonged drought drained Lake Lanier almost to the point of disaster, Georgia officials were simultaneously imperious and baffled at their lack of leverage.

Although Mayor Hartsfield had dismissed the idea that the Atlanta area would come to depend on Lanier, by 1990, Atlanta was using hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day, and the states downstream sued, claiming that Atlanta’s galloping use of Chattahoochee water was impinging on everyone else’s use.

U.S. District Court judge Paul Magnuson, in a ruling consolidating and resolving six separate cases involving eighteen litigants, agreed completely with Alabama and Florida.

“The Court recognizes that this is a draconian result,” wrote Magnuson, but the law doesn’t say, “Changes shall be made only upon the approval of Congress unless it is inconvenient to do so.”

Perdue’s emergency Water Contingency Planning Task Force produced a forty-two-page report.

...Las Vegas couldn’t continue to use water the way it was if it wanted to grow, and that securing new water supplies would be both difficult and essential. The interesting thing about both those apparently banal insights is that doing anything about them requires not just insight but a vision for what the future might look like, and a kind of long-haul planning and long-haul determination that is mostly absent from public policy today, in water and everywhere else.

After she has spent twenty-one years trying to give Las Vegas a sense of both water appreciation and water security, the precipitous drop in Lake Mead makes the city seem less water secure than ever.

She’s girding for the process of getting permits to build a pipeline to bring groundwater from only two counties away, if she ever gets permission to take it.

Ike’s storm surge filled the first floor of the University of Texas Medical Branch hospital, rendering the ER and the operating rooms of one of the nation’s premier level 1 trauma centers useless for months.

Those natural gas engines—they look like ungainly motors pulled from 1965 farm tractors, and they roar like the sound of a hurricane itself—should have kept the water running right through the storm.

Eric Wilson is unflappable. He was forty-three when Ike arrived, and he knows water systems from the ground up—he got his start walking from house to house, reading water meters. He has tightly cropped hair, and his expression defaults to an open-faced smile, making him seem cheerful almost all the time.

It’s an austere, well-lit room, about the size of a suburban home’s garage. On one long wall, four fat pipes emerge at about head height. The pipes take an elbow-turn down, and exit into the concrete floor.

You can gaze as long as you want at the servers, from any angle, but you will never get any inkling of either the workings of the Internet or its usefulness and charisma.

Four big motors, with pumps attached, are lined up on the floor, surrounded by water pipes. The wall opposite the balcony is covered with electrical conduits and boxes; a set of steps leads down from the balcony into the motor pit.

In the tanks, a combination of aeration, gunk-eating bacteria, gravity, and a smattering of chemicals routinely turns raw incoming sewage into water clean enough to be released directly into Galveston Bay, at about 4,500 gallons a minute.

Squirrels and seagulls, hippos and salmon all produce copious waste, but none have resorted to creating waste treatment facilities.

Pennsylvania literally had to wrest the utility from its owner and hand it off to another company to get the problem corrected.

It wasn’t a question, actually. It was a decree.
As LeBlanc moved on to talk about an emergency no-burning ordinance, Wilson slipped out of the banquet room.

Although he and the city utility staff of seventy had been working twenty-one-hour days for the previous week, tangible progress was mighty thin.

The next day, Sunday, back at 30th Street Station, the navy arrives, without fanfare but with an unmistakable air of determined competence.

In both 1960 and 1970, the United States had a startling benchmark: During the ten years when the United States made it to the Moon, more homes had televisions than had complete indoor plumbing.