It's 2013, and Las Vegas is facing its biggest challenge since the railroad strike of 1922 nearly shut down the town.

Several major crises have local business leaders and politicians in a panic. First, the community's water supply is tapped out. No new water permits are being issued, because all available resources have been allocated.

An unrelenting Western drought has exacerbated the problem, reducing the amount of water Las Vegas can draw from Lake Mead. Dramatic conservation efforts -- including the symbolic draining of the Bellagio lake -- have not made up for the community's rapid growth.

Home builders are leaving town, seeking wetter climes. Tens of thousands of construction workers are putting their homes up for sale and looking for jobs elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas resort industry is anguished that McCarran International Airport has reached capacity. Airlines are forced to tell prospective Vegas visitors that there aren't any more seats. Giant hotels expecting sold-out weekends are finding themselves with hundreds of empty rooms.

McCarran's salvation, a new airport under construction in the Ivanpah Valley south of Las Vegas, is still five years away from opening.

Finally, traffic congestion in the resort corridor has become intolerable. Strip development over the past decade has turned Las Vegas Boulevard into a parking lot, frustrating tourists, delaying deliveries and deterring locals from frequenting Strip resorts.

Mass transit solutions on the Strip are nonexistent. The monorail closed in 2007, the result of low ridership and an inability to raise money for an airport extension. Meanwhile, Strip CAT buses jammed with sweaty tourists and resort workers inch forward in the perpetual traffic jam. Workers are applying for jobs at casinos in Pahrump and Mesquite so they don't have to spend hours getting to and from work.

It's 2013, and Las Vegas is finally experiencing the ill effects of its growth addiction.

I dreamed up this nightmare scenario the other day after Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, went public with her fears for Las Vegas' future. In no uncertain terms, Mulroy said if the state engineer does not approve her agency's $2 billion plan to build a pipeline to rural Nevada and pump groundwater to the big city, Las Vegas will be in a world of hurt somewhere around 2013.

Increasingly worried that rural and environmental critics of the pipeline could delay or derail state approval, Mulroy did not offer the usual measured language of the professional politician. Instead, she issued a clear warning, predicting a "market collapse" if Las Vegas doesn't secure more water.

Her words also suggested a threat -- that if the state engineer, Tracy Taylor, were to rule against the pipeline plan, he would be responsible for the collapse of the Las Vegas economy and soon could be looking for a new job. After the appearance of such a threat was printed in the Las Vegas Sun, Mulroy quickly denied that any such thing was intended.

But the question of whether Mulroy threatened the state engineer's job is a side issue. What's more troubling is that the Las Vegas economy is so transparently dependent on growth.

Jim Deacon, a longtime UNLV environmental studies professor and pipeline opponent, made a point that many Las Vegas business and political leaders know in their hearts is true but refuse to come to grips with.

"Growth is eventually unsustainable," Deacon told the Sun. "We have neither infinite resources nor infinite space in which we can expand."

In other words, the time will come, sooner rather than later, when Las Vegas is no longer adding 5,000 residents a month, when the Strip's visitor volume is no longer rising by 2 million per year. Yet the community has been so successful for so long that it ignores or dismisses telling signs that the future offers some serious challenges.

Today, Las Vegas is like the kid who goes trick-or-treating and inhales handfuls of Halloween candy that very night -- an act of gluttony predicated on an irrational fear that if he doesn't gobble it down now, it'll be gone in the morning.

The painful stomachache that follows is what's in store for Las Vegas if it doesn't deal with its growth addiction before things go sour.

Don't misunderstand: Growth has been very, very good to Las Vegas. It has dramatically expanded and diversified the job market and entrepreneurial opportunities. It has brought wonderful cultural amenities to this remote desert outpost, from In-N-Out Burger to the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, from good bookstores to UNLV's law school.

But growth comes at a price: The mythical Las Vegas of the 1950s, when everybody knew everybody and Frank Sinatra crooned in a lounge, is long gone, replaced by the classic urban maladies of traffic-choked highways, violent crime and overcrowded emergency rooms.

Mulroy's warning focused specifically on the rural pipeline. But I hope her words serve as an alarm in a more general sense.

We have to start thinking about and preparing for a more mature Las Vegas, one that is not racing chaotically forward regardless of the consequences.

Geoff Schumacher (gschumacher@ reviewjournal.com) is Stephens Media's director of community publications. He is the author of "Sun, Sin & Suburbia: An Essential History of Modern Las Vegas." His column appears Sunday.