VICTOR JOECKS: Why Las Vegas isn’t running out of water

There are three certainties in Las Vegas: death, taxes and people worrying about water.

As Southern Nevada endures another brutal heat wave, it makes you wonder why people ever decided to settle here. And it wasn’t because Las Vegas used to be a temperate paradise. On August 13, 1937, it hit 115 degrees in Las Vegas. As I write, the forecasted high for Wednesday is “just” 109 degrees. Remember this the next time alarmists blame carbon emissions for the Las Vegas heat.

Unsurprisingly given these extreme temperatures, Southern Nevada used to be sparsely populated. The state of Nevada formed Clark County in 1909. The 1910 census put its population at 3,321.

Even by 1940, Clark County’s had only 16,414 residents. And then growth exploded. The population tripled in the next decade. In 1970, it topped 270,000. Today, 2.4 million people live in Southern Nevada.

Obviously, there are many factors for this growth. But two foundational ones are air conditioning and water. In the middle of the 20th century, home AC units became widely available. That made living in Las Vegas much more tolerable in the summer. AC is so ubiquitous now that it’s easy to take it for granted, even as renewable mandates make powering it more expensive.

But water is another matter. Lake Mead’s bathtub ring is a constant reminder that there isn’t as much as there used to be. The Southern Nevada Water Authority constantly tells residents when they can’t water. It pays people to rip out their grass. It has even successfully pushed for limits on the size of new pools.

There’s a begrudging acceptance of these restrictions because if we run out of water, modern Las Vegas would cease to exist.

This raises questions worth addressing. Where is the water going to come from for all these new houses? Doesn’t additional development, especially if more federal land is released, threaten existing residents’ access to water?

It’s an important concern and one that’s widely shared.

Ninety percent of our water comes from the Colorado River, but Nevada’s allocation is the smallest in the lower basin, by far. California and Arizona draw much more of this precious resource from the river. Southern Nevada is supposed to receive 300,000 acre-feet every year from the Colorado. An acre-foot is about what two single-family homes use in a year.

You’ve probably noticed the problem. Clark County has well more than 900,000 housing units and served more than 40 million visitors last year. Why hasn’t your faucet already run dry?

Because there’s another part to this story. Aggressive conservation efforts have significantly lowered the average household’s usage in Southern Nevada. And when you use a gallon of water indoors, it doesn’t disappear. The water authority recycles almost all of it. That is often done by returning it to Lake Mead. That generates a “return flow credit,” allowing Southern Nevada to take another gallon from Lake Mead. Without this system, we would have run out of water in 1992.

But with this system in place, new housing developments — absent lawns — are sustainable. To put it in environmental terms, indoor water use in Las Vegas is a renewable resource.

Water remains scarce, but thanks to careful stewardship, Las Vegas isn’t running out of it.

Contact Victor Joecks at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on X.