This August for the first time in history, the federal government is expected to declare a water shortage along the Colorado River, triggering mandatory water cutbacks.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt and additional supporting sponsors.

(Kipp Ortenburger) Water levels at Lake Mead are predicted to hit an important but troubling milestone this summer.

For the first time, the water will hit a level so low that the federal government will designate a water shortage.

Now, that means that water allotment for Nevada and Arizona will be cut back.

Well, this week on Nevada Week, we're going to examine what the water shortage means to Las Vegas residents and what some long-term solutions might be.

But we start with how we got there.

♪♪♪ In the 1920s, leaders in the West knew growing cities and burgeoning agriculture would need water.

They turned to the Colorado River, but they had to find a way to share the river so that one state, namely fast-growing California, wouldn't get an outsized portion.

They had to decide how much to give to each state in the river's basin and make that allotment fair.

To do that scientists first looked at just how much water was flowing through the river, but the years they observed were not typical.

The data used showed flows of more than 16 million acre feet a year, but the average annual flow is closer to 13.5 million acre feet, and that flow can fluctuate wildly from year to year.

Despite warnings from hydrologists, the estimates were off.

Seven states, divided into upper and lower basins, sealed the agreement in November of 1922.

For its part, Nevada got 300,000 acre feet of water a year, which is just 4% of the lower basin states' allotment.

By comparison, California got more than 58%.

Now, almost 100 years later, the states that use the river are reaping what was sown with that agreement.

Average flows have dropped over the years.

Growth has pulled more water from the river.

Plus, a 20-plus years-long drought and climate change have compounded the water shortage.

For Nevada Week, I'm Natalie Cullen.

Well, the big question for many people in Southern Nevada is what does it mean for our daily life?

I sat down with the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, John Entsminger, to talk exactly about that.

John, thanks again for joining us.

I think this is the second time we've had a conversation and, you know, I want to get right to it.

There doesn't seem to be any turning away from the federal shortage declaration that's coming.

It seems bad for Southern Nevada and for anybody that's maybe not been following this story.

I think when the news breaks, there might be a certain level of panic.

What's the reality of the situation?

(John Entsminger) Well, the reality of the situation is the hydrology on the Colorado River over the last 20 years, and this year in particular is not good, so it is a serious situation at the basin scale.

However, here in Southern Nevada, we've been preparing for this situation for the last 20 years, so we do have the tools in place to ensure a safe and reliable water supply for the residents here in Southern Nevada.

-We hear a lot about acre feet, and our allocation on the river is 300,000 acre feet.

For one thing, how many households or how many residents does an acre foot serve here in Southern Nevada?

-One acre foot will take care of about three households for one year.

-So if we do the math on that 300,000 acre feet, that's about 900,000 households.

We have about 1.2 million roughly households right now, and we're projected to grow 30%.

How does the math match up if we've got that allocation but so much more usage?

-Well, because one thing you're talking about is what you're delivering to the house isn't what's depleted from the river, right?

So because we sit on the shore of Lake Mead, everything that hits a drain in Southern Nevada is treated and put back into the lake, and you can take that amount of water back out again.

So while we don't have a large water supply, what we do have is a geographic advantage in terms of sitting upstream of Hoover Dam.

-So we've got recycling, that's additional water.

I understand that we have some water that's still banked in the lake as well; is that true or have we used those resources as well?

-No.

We actually haven't accessed any of our banked water yet, and it's not just in Lake Mead.

We have worked with our partners in Arizona and California to bank water resources in those states.

We've recharged the aquifer here in the Las Vegas Valley.

So if you add up all our different bank accounts, we have over 2 million acre feet of reserves right now, and frankly, no other city that I'm aware of anywhere in the world, but certainly not in the desert Southwest, has anything like the kind of reserves that Las Vegas has.

-So that's a significant amount of water that we have in reserves, then.

Is there a tipping point?

And I go back to that we might see population increases of 30%.

We do have a public lands bill that could allow for extreme growth, and I think this is a big public concern is with this growth, do we have enough water to sustain that, and where would that tipping point be?

-Well, the first thing for our community to realize is we do a 50-year resource plan every single year.

So we always have a five-decade outlook, matching up what we think population growth is going to look like and we add population growth to what the state demographer says is going to happen.

We add population growth to what UNLV has projected to happen.

We then match that up with our conservation goals and show what our water demands are going to be in the 2070s.

That way we can look at it every year and say okay, here's our resources, here's our banked supplies, here's where we might need some new water and be able to guarantee we have sufficient water.

So we plan for in our current plan a population in 2071 of up to 4 million people regardless of where they live in Southern Nevada.

-So we're comfortable with where our water is, but you've stressed in your opinion columns lately that we need to do a better job.

The residents need to do a better job; it's incumbent on us.

I want to read a quote from one of your opinion columns.

"Conservation is a journey "not a destination, and our community's "conservation journey continues."

What path do we need to take here in Southern Nevada?

-Well, first of all, I don't think it's a single path.

We say in the water business, there's no silver bullet to water conservation but there is silver buckshot.

So we have a multifaceted approach on what it's going to take to ensure a safe and reliable water supply.

The first thing is with the passage of AB 356 by the Nevada Lgegislature, we need to get rid of non-functional turf, and we're going to have a citizens' committee meet and precisely define what that means, but to me it means if we have grass in the valley and the only person walking on it is the person that mows it, that's a luxury that our community can no longer afford.

So we need to get rid of non-functional turf.

We need to increase compliance with our existing wastewater regulations.

We need to take steps to capture water that's currently going into septic systems so we get that water back into Lake Mead.

We need to be much more efficient with evaporative cooling.

And if you add all this stuff up, we show in our resource plan how we can take our gallons per capita per day down from 112 currently all the way down to 98 gallons per person per day, -Which obviously increases the amount of households that could use each acre foot of water.

-It increases the reliability of our water supply both for existing customers and for whatever economic diversification comes down the road in the coming decades.

-And our public charge, and maybe let's talk about the individual that they've gotten rid of their turf, and they've reduced their water.

What more can that individual do right now?

-Well, for one thing, they can help us make sure everything is being enforced uniformly.

We have a new app on the Water District website.

If you see water running down the gutter, if you would-- you know, there's a geotracker in there.

If you would report that, that would help us make sure that everyone is following the rules.

We show that a 15% increase in everybody following the existing rules will generate about the same amount of water savings as our maximum shortage under federal law.

-We've talked about this before, the regional conversation here.

Let's transition the conversation to that a little bit.

You've already mentioned the partnership with Southern California here too.

But when we're talking more regional, what are some of the moves you think we can make as a region to really reduce our consumption of Colorado River water?

-Well, at the basin scale, we have to acknowledge that in 1922, we divvied up a lot more water than Mother Nature is providing in the 21st century.

So the first step is everyone-- and we're talking seven states, 40 million Americans-- everybody has to come to grips with the fact that you do not have as much water as was promised to you in 1922.

Once you've had that sort of, you know, breakthrough moment and you're not trying to, you know, calibrate your existing uses to promises made a century ago, then you have to look locally and say okay, how are we going to manage, you know, whatever diminished slice of pie we have in order to take care of our community?

-You mentioned the Southern California water treatment program.

We are collaborating there.

What benefit does that have for our community as far as water?

-Well, it's a really great project because right now I mentioned that all of the water we use indoors gets put back in Lake Mead and taken back out.

In Southern California, all of their wastewater gets discharged to the Pacific Ocean and cannot be recovered and used again.

So what the project is is to take all that wastewater generated in the LA basin, treat it to a higher standard and inject it into the aquifer under Los Angeles so they can reuse that water again.

In return for our investment, and our board has already added $750 million to our major capital plan to participate in that project, in return for that financial participation, Los Angeles would then leave a piece of their Colorado River entitlement in Lake Mead for use by Southern Nevadans.

-John, thank you very much for your time.

We appreciate it.

-Thank you very much.

-Well, with less water in the river and more growth expected in Southern Nevada and the West in general, what are some of the long-term solutions to the regional water problem?

Joining us to talk about that part of the issue is Heidi Kyser, senior writer and producer for Nevada Public Radio, and Sean McKenna, executive director of hydrologic sciences at the Desert Research Institute.

Well, thank you so much for being here; we really appreciate it.

And again, we're going to center our conversation on the entire Colorado River basin.

Sean, I want to go to you first.

I don't see how we get around this topic without talking about supply and demand, and I want to start with the supply part of this conversation.

Can give us just some insight on how much water annually do we have in the entire basin that we can use right now?

(Sean McKenna) Right, and I think this goes back to the 1920s when the Colorado Compact was signed between the seven basin states.

At that time it was felt to be about 16-1/2 million acre feet, and I think even in those days, that was probably a bit aspirational.

In reality I think now we're probably somewhere 20% to 30% less than that, maybe around 13, 13-1/2 million acre feet flowing down the Colorado each year, and that is allotted to both the upper basin states and the southern basin states.

-Now, if we were to plot this in a line graph, 16-1/2 million now, 13-1/2 million, a decline.

I mean, is that the general trend here?

Is there anything we see in the data that shows that we could see an increase in that at all?

-Well, it's never a linear decrease, right?

One year to the next, we have drier years, we have wetter years, but I think the general trend certainly since then, or maybe even since the '50s, it has been decreasing.

-Heidi, let's talk a little about the demand side of this and the usage of water in the Colorado River basin, the entire basin here.

In the reporting you're doing and some of the information gathering, is there any evidence that maybe you're getting from experts that we're using the same water maybe that we did when we were at 16-1/2 acres or that we are reducing our water usage?

(Heidi Kyser) There are some areas where usage has been declining; for instance, Southern Nevada Water Authority is proud of the conservation they've done that has allowed usage to go down while population has been increasing.

But the overall trend line is increasing usage with increasing population, and population is growing.

-Population is growing, and I think we need to talk about something I know you have covered is the public lands bill that Senator Cortez Masto has proposed, a bill that protects a lot of land but a bill that also adds a lot of residential space as well.

Can we can we afford that type of growth, do you think?

-That's a good question.

"SNEDCA," as Clark County has really tried to call this thing, the Southern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act, is a proposal that has to do with allowing public land or federally managed land to be used for development and other uses.

So it really concerns land.

It doesn't directly address water, but it does allow for-- in its current form, it does allow for a net of about 30,000 additional acres of development.

In the original thinking and the original reports that were put out about that and the necessity for that, it was projected by researchers at UNLV that it would be accommodating growth of something like 820,000 additional people in Southern Nevada over the next 60 years.

So when you consider that, as I'm sure Mr. Entsminger pointed out, the average Las Vegan consumes 112 gallons of water per day and you multiply that by 820,000, that's a lot of people.

-So residential use is obviously a big concern.

We've got that in Southern Nevada and northern-- we have that in the southern region, I should say, of the Colorado River basin.

In the northern region of course we've got population growth too, but we also have industrial and agricultural growth.

How are those things impacting water usage?

-Right, and as we go into a drier series of years, we look at are we in a drought or a megadrought or how do we define that?

In the past we've defined drought really by a lack of precipitation, right, a lack of supply.

What we've really come to think about more closely in the last five years or so is the demand for water that's in the soil, and I think if you think about an atmosphere that is heating up, it's able to hold more moisture.

It's pulling more moisture from the land and is making that drier.

So we now talk about not just a lack of rain but also atmospheric thirst, the draw that the atmosphere has on that land, and that's making it more challenging for farmers in the upper basin to be able to irrigate their crops and grow the crops that they've been able to in the past.

-And obviously more demand for water then if it's taking more water to irrigate the crops.

-Right.

-Let's talk a little bit about the climate conversation here.

Heidi, this is something else you cover extensively, and I don't think there's little debate that we are seeing climate changes.

I think there's probably some debate still on if it's human-induced climate or these are just normal climate fluxes that we're seeing.

What are some of the experts you're talking to telling you?

-I think that most of the experts agree that it is human caused and I think, you know, it's interesting that Sean mentioned the megadrought.

You know, I think scientists have some debate and different definitions of what that actually means, but the way that I like to think of it and the way that the experts I talk to think about it is you already had climate change making an impact or you already have the water on the Colorado River for instance being over-allocated.

Now you add climate change, and that's kind of like a turbocharger, turbocharging that reduction, right?

So we already had extreme heat in Southern Nevada, then you add climate change, and now you have these off-the-charts, unexpected events and things happening like we see in the Pacific Northwest.

So the people that-- the folks that I'm talking to from experts, subject-matter experts all the way down to folks who call our daily radio show, State of Nevada, are starting to say like wow, I knew it was coming but I didn't know it was going to be this fast or feel this extreme or be this stark, and I think that's where the idea of "mega" has come from, right?

Like climate change is just accelerating and kind of amplifying everything.

I don't know, maybe you want to add to that.

-I would agree, Heidi.

We think of climate change a lot, in that we're still going to have drier years and wetter years, but the intensity or the extremes on those are going to be greater and it's really a multiplier, if you will, that climate change adds to that.

-And I mean, we live in the desert.

We're used to extremes here, and we do have wet years and if we look at trends, we'll have a very wet year, more water on the river, followed by dry years.

But it sounds like what you're saying is those are becoming a lot more extreme.

-Right.

Yes, exactly.

You see that in the droughts here.

I mean, we had a reasonably good snowpack in the upper Colorado basin this year, but the rate at which it melted and went away was extraordinary, very quickly.

And part of that is from a drier previous year, and part of that is this atmospheric thirst as well.

-Your perspectives on being able to change maybe some of the trends that we're seeing here, of course our state has our own climate strategic plan that we are implementing.

A lot of other states in the basin do as well, and then of course this is a much bigger area than just our region itself.

I mean, if we are to implement some of our key climate strategies, best case scenario projection, is there an amount of time where we can start to see maybe some changes that could lead to some of the lesser drought conditions we're seeing?

-Right.

I think it would be very difficult for anyone to say what that timeframe is or if that timeframe even exists.

I think we're-- in the realm of recorded history in the Western U.S., you know, we don't have a lot of that, right?

So we don't know what's coming next.

That's very difficult to predict.

-Heidi, let's transition the conversation.

Let's talk about as we said, this is a regional issue, a regional problem.

Let's talk about some of the regional solutions that we have here.

I want to start again with some of the things that we've done here in Southern Nevada-- a lot of conservation efforts, a lot of innovation that we've been able to employ here to reduce the amount of water we're using.

What are some of those things you think that can be replicated through the entire basin?

-Well, it's interesting that you put it that way, that it could be replicated because the Southern Nevada Water Authority is currently working with the Metropolitan Water District in California on an agreement to sort of share, swap some technology for some water on paper, right?

So sort of teaching them how to use some of our conservation measures or wastewater reuse in exchange for getting some of their allotment.

Those are the kinds of big-picture deals I think we'll see a lot more of going forward.

Things like desalination sound very sexy and exciting and are not off the table.

I think that, you know, there are active desalination plants in California, but as far as Southern Nevada is concerned, the greatest-- the most cost-efficient thing that we can do is still conservation.

You know, that $3 per square foot turf replacement program that SNWA has is one of the easiest ways to conserve water.

And then, you know, for instance, my husband sitting at the breakfast table recently got an update on his water app saying, you know, it's time to switch your water clock.

People don't realize how much water they can save by doing things like changing their water, their watering patterns seasonally.

Those are where the big gains are.

And then the last thing is of course we had in the 2021 state legislative session, we had AB 356, I think it was, that passed that's going to reduce ornamental turf grass, as they call it.

But those are the things that really matter because about 60% of the water we consume in Southern Nevada can't be recycled because it's consumptive use.

It's outdoor use, right?

So that's the water that really needs to be targeted for conservation.

-Outdoor use, and one of the primary uses of course is that turf or grass.

Let's talk about the north Colorado River basin too.

Turf is a big thing in Southern Nevada.

Is that something we can do more in say a state like Colorado or Wyoming?

-Well, there may be a solution similar to that.

I think one thing that we're working on now at DRI that we're very excited about is something that we call Open ET, and "ET" is short for evapo-transpiration, and let me just explain what that is.

The surface of the land that there's soil moisture, that could either move to the atmosphere through evaporation or through the plants, the vegetation, the crops that are grown there that pull water out of the soil into the atmosphere, and that's transpiration.

We put those together and call it ET.

So we have partnered with NASA, with the Environmental Defense Fund and with Google and a number of universities to build a solution called Open ET which will be rolled out in all 17 Western states this year to allow water managers and farmers to better understand the amount of moisture they're losing from the soil to the atmosphere.

You can think about when you want to conserve water or run your irrigation more efficiently, similar to the app that you mentioned for your home use, this is really for farm use, and that's something-- that is a technology that can be used across the West.

-Interesting, and as far as, you know, a local farmer that uses this then, it seems like just by some of the partner agencies you mentioned there, that it might be a lot of air monitoring, satellite monitoring.

Exactly how is that done?

-Yes, very good.

Using forecasts, weather forecasts for near-surface conditions, and then as you said, also using satellite imagery.

So we make heavy use of the Landsat satellite system to do this, and it provides resolution below the scale of individual agricultural fields, so you can actually see variations within maybe an 80-acre patch.

-Heidi mentioned desal, and that of course is something that comes up every time you talk about water.

Something else that comes up is maybe cloud seeding and there are some other high-end technology solutions there.

When we're looking again to the Colorado River basin, are any of those possible here?

-Well, certainly possible and at DRI, we've been doing cloud seeding in the Colorado basin as well for probably 40 years now, and that's shown good results.

It works in certain situations, certain locations, and I think we'll continue to do that.

But I think there's other solutions as well, and one we were just talking about is kind of a low-tech solution, in very hot urban areas where we worry about heat islands, the idea of bringing back more trees, calling it urban forestry almost, to provide shade, to provide cooling, sequester carbon, it's a good solution, and we'll be doing more of that.

-Very interesting.

Yes, we could all use more trees, I know, especially in Southern Nevada.

We've got a little bit less than a minute.

Pipelines are something that's come up a lot, and we see some that are happening in the north, some that are happening in the south.

Again, your reporting, are you seeing the pipelines are a potential solution that we might be employing here?

-Not that I know of.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority has kind of tabled its idea for a pipeline, as you know, from Eastern Nevada.

But there is another one on the drawing board or, you know, currently being pushed for in western Utah, and there are some other proposals in northern Nevada so I think we will continue to see that.

-Well, we want to thank our panelists, Heidi Kyser with public-- I'm sorry, Nevada Public Radio and Sean McKenna with Desert Research Institute.

And thank you of course as always for joining us this week on Nevada Week.

Now, for any of the resources discussed on the show including Southern Nevada Water Authority's seasonal watering schedule and how to get rebates on replacing some of that grass with desert landscaping or even buying a pool cover, please visit our website at vegaspbs.org/nevada-week.

You can also always find us on social media at @nevadaweek.

Thanks again, and we'll see you next week.

♪♪♪