Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  Why is the water going down?

  Lake Mead stores Colorado River water for delivery to farms, homes and businesses in southern Nevada, Arizona, southern California and northern Mexico. About 96 percent of the water in Lake Mead is from melted snow that fell in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming.

  Each year, Lake Mead receives a minimum amount of Colorado River water from these states, known as the “Upper Basin” states. And each year, a specific amount of water is released from Lake Mead to users in Nevada, Arizona, California and Mexico. In an “average” year, the amount of water flowing out of Lake Mead exceeds the amount of water flowing into Lake Mead. In some years, Lake Mead receives much more than the minimum amount of water from the Upper Basin, but the amount of water released from Lake Mead does not vary much from year to year.

  The water level in Lake Mead is lower than it has been in over 40 years. The water is going down because the Colorado River runoff from snowmelt over the last decade has been far below normal. This has combined with increased evaporation from rising temperatures.

  CLIMATE CHANGE

  Depending on who is measuring, overall median temperatures in the Southwest have increased by almost two degrees Fahrenheit. This may not seem like much, but think of it in terms of the human body. If you have a two-degree fever, your body temperature is 100.6 and chances are you don’t feel so well and may go to bed. Another four-degree increase, you have a fever of 104.6 and you are probably in a coma. In other words, two degrees of temperature increase are significant and have a disproportionate effect on weather patterns. The problem in the flow of the Colorado River begins in the smaller snowfalls of the Rocky Mountains.

  As the Park Service bulletin states, drought has increased the amount of evaporation and decreased the amount of snowfall in the Rockies so that the overall flow of the Colorado is considerably less than the numbers Herbert Hoover and the states put into place in 1922. The Park Service doesn’t mention that the drought has come from climate change in which wet climates are getting wetter and dry places are getting drier. The entire Southwest is a dry place. The other problem at Lake Mead is the buildup of silt flats at the ends of the reservoirs.

  The word Colorado means “colorful” in Spanish. The river used to be known as the red river, or “Old Red,” because it carried enormous amounts of silt drawn from those red-rock layers that make up the wonderful canyons and mountains it drains. During the building of Hoover Dam, construction workers had to let water settle in a pool before they could take water to drink or boil. Reclamation engineers were worried about silt from the minute Hoover Dam opened in 1936. Their worry was the reason for the tens of thousands of Navajo sheep and cattle slaughtered in the 1930s supposedly to prevent the silt runoff from overgrazed areas from flowing into the river. It was in fact a tiny part of the problem. The real solution was the construction of Glen Canyon Dam at Page in 1963. That second dam caught much of the silt that used to build up behind Hoover Dam. (Lake Powell is at 48 percent of capacity.) Even so, the silt flats are still growing in Lake Mead.

  In the 1960s John McPhee arranged a famous rafting trip down the Colorado River for Floyd Dominy, the legendary head of the Bureau of Reclamation, and David Brower, then head of the Sierra Club. The question of the moment was Brower’s opposition to Dominy’s proposed building of a third dam on the Colorado River at Marble Gorge. This proposed dam was going to provide the hydroelectricity to power the fourteen pumping stations of the Central Arizona Project and finally provide Arizona with its share of Colorado River water. During the trip McPhee recorded the two men’s exchange over the issue of silt.

  “They said Hoover Dam was going to silt up Lake Mead in thirty years,” Dominy said. “For thirty years, Lake Mead caught all the God-damned silt in the Colorado River, and Hoover has not been impaired.”

  Brower’s answer:

  “No, but when [Lake] Mead is low there are forty miles of silt flats at its upper end, and they’re getting bigger.”

  David Brower and the Sierra Club won that argument with Dominy, and the Marble Gorge dam was never built. Unfortunately, the Sierra Club’s victory would prove disastrous for the Hopi and Navajo of Black Mesa because the Bureau of Reclamation would substitute coal-fired electricity for hydroelectricity. The Department of the Interior under Stewart Udall authorized the construction of a 2,250-megawatt power plant, the ironically named Navajo Generating Station (no ownership by the Navajo, and half of Navajo families don’t have electricity), from which the Bureau of Reclamation would purchase a fourth of the electricity in order to run the fourteen pumping stations that would pump the Colorado River up over three mountain ranges 330 miles into Phoenix and Tucson. This Arizona aqueduct was called the Central Arizona Project, or CAP, and in 1973 a second coal-mining site opened on Black Mesa, the Kayenta Mine, to supply coal for the new power plant.

  Finally, after forty years, Arizona would be able to use its full allocation from the Colorado River. The Navajo Generating Station is the only coal-fired power plant in the country that is majority owned by the federal government through the US Bureau of Reclamation.

  The energy for the fourteen pumping stations, siphons, and tunnels of the Central Arizona Project still comes from Black Mesa coal. The urgency for the water and the substitution of the power plant for the hydroelectric dam contributed to the inability to modify the legislation that set in motion the mass removal of Navajo like Roberta Blackgoat. Neither conservative Republican Barry Goldwater nor liberal Democrat Stewart Udall was going to do anything that might endanger water for the parched desert cities of Phoenix and Tucson. Phoenix had five dams high in the Superstition Mountains on the Salt River, and it had pumped out all its groundwater. Was the rerouted Colorado River into CAP the only possible new source for water?

  THE CENTRAL ARIZONA PROJECT

  I drove to the outer edge of the Phoenix city limits to arrive at Thunderbird Road and the headquarters of the Central Arizona Project, the world’s most expensive water system. Apart from the $8 billion required to build it, it also requires 750 megawatts of electricity to run the pumping stations that move the water through tunnels and siphons, over mountains and across canyons. Just as the Mohave plant was famous for its slurry-pipeline delivery system, the Central Arizona Project was famous for having the highest pump lift of any water in the world. The project includes fourteen pumping stations, three tunnels, ten siphons (pipes), and sections of open-air aqueducts that run for 337 miles across terrain of high mountains, deep canyons, and desert. At one point outside of Phoenix the aqueduct tunnels beneath the Salt River. The water goes to irrigation for agriculture, to municipal water for the city of Phoenix, and to provide 1 million gallons of water a day for each of Phoenix’s 247 golf courses.

  The CAP headquarters are in a building complex designed by Taliesin West, the Phoenix branch of the architectural firm founded by Frank Lloyd Wright. Seen from an airplane, the Central Arizona Project appears to be a ribbon of white concrete with a sunlit flash of water in the middle. From its control room on Thunderbird Road, it is a computer room filled with men sitting in the dim glow of computer consoles, tapping keys, adjusting screens, and monitoring messages. With a few taps of the keys one man at a computer can open the gates to an irrigation ditch that releases thousands of gallons of water to irrigate agricultural fields or to provide drinking water to a municipality. It reminded me of a video game.

  When I visited, the operations supervisor introduced himself as Freddy, formerly from Attleboro, Massachusetts, and twenty-eight-year veteran of the Navy. He explained the complexity and the uniqueness of the system. “It is the only project in the world that lifts water twenty-nine hundred feet,” he said. The pump lift from the Havasu reservoir to Phoenix is twelve hundred feet; the pump lift from Phoenix to Tucson is sixteen hundred feet. Instead of storage reservoirs, they use pumping plants. At the Havasu Pumping House, Hitachi and Mitsubishi did the motors. He listed the major contractors and said Bechtel Corporation built the pum
ping plants. He explained the multicounty water districts and the role of the independent board of directors, the repayment system, the unique dam construction of the New Waddell storage dam, the modification of the Roosevelt Dam, the problems with subsidence, the price per acre-foot to the water districts, the competing water claims from mining interests, Indians (Pima, Papago, Apache), the projected amounts of groundwater replenishment, other competing claims of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, per-person water consumption (Phoenix 250–270 gallons, Tucson 150 gallons), actual water flow of the Colorado River (15.8 instead of 17), changing names for different sections of the aqueduct (Hayden-Rhodes, Goldwater-Fanin, Udall), the experimental desalinization plant built for Mexico, the marketing agreement for the electricity from the Navajo generating plant, the seven-mile tunnel on the Tucson stretch, the number of employees (370 on the CAP payroll and 700 Bureau of Reclamation), the water treatment plant needed for city users and the objections by Tucson residents for the high cost, wildlife bridges and the migration patterns of animals blocked by the aqueduct, cameras on mountaintops and buried cable, and all their security systems. He was anxious to tell me about all their security systems because I had arrived with a letter of introduction from Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts (now secretary of state), so Freddy wanted me to reassure the senator about how secure and how safe the overall installation was. Actually, the letter had been written by his environmental legislative aide, and even though I explained that I was doing research on the Navajo Generating Station and the source of the electricity that provides the energy to run the pumping stations—and who was paying for it—he kept returning to the subject of security. Arizona is a state where anyone is allowed to carry a gun anywhere, even into a bar on a Saturday night unless a “No firearms allowed” sign is posted. Many institutions have the overall feel of a military base, and I suspect there are many retired military running things in Arizona. So security is a central topic.

  Climate change has changed the meaning of security. Normal is a word constantly subject to redefinition. Two sets of data, tracked in multiple decimal points, are continuously being fed into computers: one set tracks the recorded water volumes of the Colorado River; the other tracks ambient temperatures in the Southwest. The higher the temperatures, the greater evaporation, and the lower the water volumes tend to be. Over the past thirty years the ambient temperatures in the Southwest have risen by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius). This means lower snowpack in the Rockies, from which the Colorado River draws its water. Only in the Arctic are there more dramatic indications of climate change. As William DeBuys has written in A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, “We are on the verge of a new form of desertification. It won’t be the result of overgrazing, failed agricultural schemes, or other familiar forms of land abuse. Instead, it will ensue from industrial society’s abuse of the atmosphere.” The trend lines are heading in only one direction—higher temperatures, lower water volumes. The combined trend lines suggest the water volumes of the Colorado River are not coming back to “normal.” The water levels of Lake Mead are on their way to even lower levels.

  FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

  Searchlight is a former mining town in the mountains between Las Vegas and Laughlin. Today there is not much to see (population 539), but when Harry Reid was growing up there, it was still a mining town and his mother worked as a laundress for the local brothels. A newspaper profile of Reid says that the town had five gold mines and sixteen brothels. His father was a hard-rock miner and an alcoholic. Teenage Harry Reid hitchhiked sixty miles to high school in Henderson (a section of Las Vegas), stayed with an aunt who introduced him to Mormonism, became a baptized Mormon, and graduated from high school. “Oh yes, I remember having Harry in high school,” said Gene Segerblom, a former teacher and Nevada assemblywoman, who was honored during Nevada Women’s History Celebration of 2010 by Harry Reid’s chief of staff from his Las Vegas office. She presented Mrs. Segerblom with a special letter of recognition from Senator Reid. His education and political career were greatly helped by another high school teacher, his boxing coach, Mike O’Callaghan, who later became governor of Nevada.

  In 1970 O’Callaghan was running for governor and tapped Harry Reid, just turned thirty and now a lawyer, as a candidate for lieutenant governor. They both won. After the lieutenant governorship, Reid ran for the Senate (lost), he ran for mayor of Las Vegas (lost), and his father committed suicide. In 1977 Governor O’Callaghan selected him to head the Nevada Gaming Commission, from which many Nevada politicians get their start. The Gaming Commission is responsible for issuing gambling licenses throughout the state. It is distinct from the Nevada Gaming Control Board, which is the agency that oversees the tax and revenue reporting from the casinos. As head of the Gaming Commission, Reid had a job that required both political finesse and awareness of the outsize economic role the gambling industry plays in Nevada. Both came into play when the commission had to decide whether to give a gaming license to Frank Sinatra. Sinatra had previously had a license at the Sands, but he had lost it because of too many public associations with known gangsters such as the Fischetti brothers, Sam Giancana, and others.

  But in 1980 Frank Sinatra applied again, this time with better references and at a time that Las Vegas needed a public relations facelift. The MGM Grand Hotel casino had just opened the city’s first huge luxury hotel, twenty-three stories high, with twenty-one hundred rooms. Not long after opening, it had one of the worst fires in American history. When the electrical fire broke out, there was no sprinkler system, fire department ladders reached only to the ninth floor, and toxic black smoke filled the upper floors. People jumped out of windows; 85 people died and 650 were hospitalized. It turned out that Las Vegas had lax fire codes. At the same time, high gas prices were discouraging weekend gamblers from driving from Los Angeles, and Nevada was no longer the only state with legal gambling. New Jersey had licensed casino gambling. Eastern gamblers were going to Atlantic City rather than flying to Las Vegas. The return of Frank Sinatra to Caesars Palace could do a lot to help lure tourists back to Las Vegas. On the other hand, he did have a lot of connections with known mobsters.

  Sinatra’s political connections outweighed the gangsters. Ronald Reagan of California had just been elected president on a conservative Republican platform very similar to that of Barry Goldwater, and Sinatra had raised $5 million for the Reagan campaign. He had also produced Reagan’s inaugural gala. One of his character witnesses before the Gaming Commission was US Attorney General William French Smith, who said he was “totally unaware of any allegations about Frank Sinatra’s background.” Soon Harry Reid and members of the commission granted a new gaming license to Sinatra, and he was performing again at Caesars Palace, drawing crowds back to Vegas.

  Within the year Harry Reid’s political fortunes took a decided upswing. In 1982 he was elected to the House of Representatives and in 1987 to the US Senate. Although he was a Mormon and Mormons don’t approve of gambling, it did not seem to be a problem. “Representing gaming is as basic to being a senator from Nevada as it would be for a senator from California to champion Disney,” wrote historian Michael Green in the Las Vegas Sun about Reid’s reconciliation of Mormon faith and gambling interests.

  At the same time Las Vegas took on a new public image in which the Mob-connected casinos had supposedly been scoured clean of crime connections. Casinos were now public companies being traded on the New York Stock Exchange. By the 1990s when the Steve Wynn era arrived, casinos were renamed “gaming enterprises,” and Las Vegas was being rebranded as a convention and family-vacation destination. Las Vegas’s population was doubling and tripling every year, and in the 1990s the city had become the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country. A time-delay sequence series of satellite images since 1970 to the present shows how Las Vegas’s city limits kept expanding into the desert like amoeba multiplying in a Petri dish. Water continued to be an issue. No one liked to ta
lk about conservation because it discouraged growth. Las Vegas continued to have the highest per capita water use in the country. The Southern Nevada Water Authority began paying people to tear up their lawns and use desert landscaping. The authority also built a water treatment plant and began recycling water, an arrangement that allowed the city to increase its annual use of the water in Lake Mead. For every gallon of treated water it put back into Lake Mead, it was allowed to take another half gallon out. (The treatment plant is only six miles upstream from the intake pipe for the city’s drinking water, and from the air a visible clouded plume runs between the two. Water quality is an issue. Former Las Vegas resident germaphobe Howard Hughes had his aide write to the governor to try to stop the project.) The water authority now says that annual per capita water use is down to 250 gallons. But there are still many developments such as Summerlin and Anthem where green lawns, golf courses, and lush landscaping are standard. Part of the problem is that the land-development companies did not attract new buyers by telling them about the need for a desert aesthetic and water conservation. The hedonism of the Strip infiltrated the rest of the city.

  A SAVAGE THIRST

  “The verdict is in for the Las Vegas Valley’s main water source and it is as grim as expected.” The headline on the August 2013 Las Vegas Review-Journal’s article read, “Federal Officials Cut Water Delivery for Lake Mead, Speeding Reservoir’s Decline.”

  The only other major source of water for Las Vegas is hundreds of miles to the north in the rural counties of Lincoln and White Pine. In the 1990s the project of taking groundwater from rural Nevada and piping it to Las Vegas from the north was always described as a last resort. Today the project is under way. Like the building of the Owens Valley Aqueduct in Los Angeles in 1913, the political leverage to import distant water into Las Vegas became an imperative with the drop in Lake Mead for 2014. Spring Valley is in White Pine County. It is a valley 100 miles long and roughly 12 miles wide and contains an aquifer fed by Mount Wheeler snowmelt. From the point of view of someone sitting in the manager’s chair in the Las Vegas Water Authority, Spring Valley is an irresistible water opportunity.