The Nevada Assembly voted 30-12 in favor of a wide-ranging water conservation bill that could lead to caps on residential water use in Las Vegas.
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After dropping more than 50 feet since 2000, latest forecasts show Lake Mead rising by roughly 22 feet by the end of the year.
The U.S. Drought Monitor says storms dropped so much water this winter that less than one-quarter of Nevada remains in drought.
The federal government laid out a pair of options to cut water use along the Colorado River and keep Lake Mead and Lake Powell from shrinking any more.
If approved, the legislation would make Nevada the first state to give a local water agency permanent say over how much water residents can use.
Nevada gets less than a 2 percent cut from the Colorado River’s waters, but the state actually uses far more water than that each year.
A bill would create a new program to use satellite imagery to estimate how much water is lost to evapotranspiration from crops.
“We won’t be around very much longer if they don’t change,” said the co-owner of a cultivation company in Carson City.
“Disastrous conditions have reshaped Lake Mead National Recreation Area’s one and a half million acres of incredible landscapes and slowly depleted the largest reservoir in the United States,” the senators wrote in a letter to the National Park Service.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority is evaluating whether changes need to be made to its lowest intake straw in order to protect water quality as Lake Mead continues to shrink.
Southern Nevada Water Authority would have the authority to impose water use restrictions on the biggest users under a bill heard by the Assembly Natural Resources Committee.
Two competing proposals to achieve federally mandated cuts to Colorado River water use are on the table, but agreement between states has remained elusive.
While states continue to negotiate over how to cut back on Colorado River water use, the Southern Nevada Water Authority is preparing for a “worst-case scenario.”
Tens of thousands of private well owners across parts of Nevada, California and Utah might be drinking water that contains unhealthy levels of arsenic, according to a new study from Desert Research Institute.
The pipeline supplies gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to locations throughout California and Nevada, including Las Vegas.
One of the Colorado River’s two major reservoirs is expected to collect better than average runoff this year, thanks to an unusually wet La Niña pattern that dropped a deluge of snow up and down the basin.
Six out of seven Colorado River basin states have settled on a proposed set of cuts aimed at saving the crumbling river system and preventing Lake Mead and Lake Powell from crashing — with one very notable state missing from the agreement.
A federal deadline to make cuts in water use from Lake Mead, Lake Powell and the rest of the Colorado River hits next week.
While not enough to fend off the falling water levels entirely, the snow that has dropped in recent weeks across the mountains that feed the river is expected to slow the decline at Lake Mead.
The water authority’s board of directors voted unanimously for $37 million for the Garnet Valley Water Transition System project, a series of pipelines that will bring water to the industrial park.
The park service has extended the deadline for comments on various proposals for how to manage and maintain launch ramps for motorized boaters at Lake Mead.