A pier juts out into the air over Lake Mead, where the water level is more than 80 feet below normal, near Baker, Nev., on Feb. 27, 2007.Jim Wilson
A ruler-sharp line marks the height where the water once was. Below the line, the rock is bleached a stark, bone-coloured white. Above, the canyon walls are of that burnt copper tint so common to the landscape of the place where Arizona and Nevada meet. Come here and you'll see it, clear as day: Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United Sates, is running dry.
While in Las Vegas earlier this month, I took a quick detour to the Hoover Dam. One of the great Depression-era megaprojects, it remains an icon of U.S. infrastructure, a gently curving wall across the azure body of the Colorado river.
Where it arrested the water, the dam created Lake Mead, a 250-square-mile well for a parched corner of the country. The lakewater here sustains more than a million acres of farmland across California and parts of Northern Mexico. Virtually all of southern Nevada's water comes from Lake Mead. A multimillion-dollar recreational industry of marinas, hotels and touristic miscellany also bustles along the Lake's 1,200 kilometres of shoreline.
Which makes it all the more alarming that Lake Mead is, by almost any measure, running out of water. The vast majority of the lake's inflow comes from snowmelt in the upriver states. But an ongoing 15-year dry stretch has cut the flow significantly. Water usage rates, however, aren't experiencing anything resembling a similar contraction.
Last summer, Lake Mead's water line stood at almost 150 feet below full capacity – its lowest level since it was first filled some 80 years ago. Today, the lake is only about 42 per cent of full capacity. The place along the canyon walls where the rock turns from white to copper indicates the historical high water mark – from the start of the white rock, it's more than 100 feet to the current water line.
The consequences of the receding waterline can be seen everywhere. Several marinas have had to re-locate or shut down completely. Boaters are increasingly running aground against previously harmless reefs. At the outer ends of the many arms that feed the lake, remnants of long-abandoned towns are starting to surface, like archeological sites that dig themselves.
But by far the most urgent consequence of Lake Mead's decline is its contribution to the ongoing water wars across much of California and the southwest. State water officials have long maintained various triggers related to the water line – every time the lake drops below a certain mark, various conservation policies kick into gear. As such, if you head out to the Las Vegas suburbs, you'll see compliance officers dispatched to enforce lawn watering regulations, on the lookout for suspiciously healthy-looking grass.
With so many different interest groups competing for a slice of an ever-shrinking pie, water policy has become one of the great wedge issues of U.S. politics. In California, for example, out-of-state Republicans have found some traction in trying to rile up farmers against various conservation policies – arguing, in effect, that local Democrats care more about saving fish than helping the state's struggling farmers. The worse the drought gets, the more likely it is that state agencies will have to resort to stricter conservation measures – perhaps, in the process, inviting the wrath of certain segments of the electorate against whoever happens to be in power when the policies kick in.
But necessity also tends to breed invention, and there are some signs of interesting new efforts to combat the record-setting dryness. In northern Nevada, scientists have gone out in the mountains to fire silver iodide particles into the sky. It's an experimental effort called Cloud Seeding, designed to help create ice crystals in winter clouds. Cloud seeding programs have shown some signs of success, but as of late, the researchers who run the programs have struggled mightily to secure the funding they need. And even in the best case scenario, it's unlikely that such programs will fully offset the effects of what has been a dry period of historic proportions. The prognosis is, any way you look at it, grim.
It's less than an hour's drive from the Hoover Dam to the Las Vegas Strip. And whereas the signposts of drought are readily visible on the cliff sides of Lake Mead, you'd be hard-pressed to see any such indicators of crisis along America's great neon Broadway. It's perhaps not all that surprising, given Las Vegas' lure as a place where no problem is too big to be ignored. But unless, against all odds, the drought finally comes to an end, it seems likely that a city built on the gospel of excess will – like the entire region that surrounds it – be forced to make do with less.