Clock is Ticking on Las Vegas’ Water Supply
August 17th, 2007Via: Las Vegas Now:
The news coming from the Southern Nevada Water Authority Thursday about the valley’s future water supply is worrisome. Unless we act quickly, there will be no water for hundreds of thousands of Las Vegas Valley residents in just three years.
Eyewitness News looked deeper into the problem and why time may not be on our side. Not only is this a race against time, but it’s going to cost valley residents dearly.
SNWA data shows drought conditions getting worse, not better forcing the general manager of the water authority to ask the board to spend more than $45 million to upgrade water pumps at Lake Mead.
Those pumps would be attached to the second drinking water intake at the lake and double its capacity to pump drinking water. At the current rate, the water level will drop below the first intake in less than three years drastically cutting the supply of drinking water to Las Vegas.
Then, there’s a three to five year gap before drinking water can be pumped through a proposed pipeline from White Pine County, which means the new pumps at Lake Mead need to be quickly installed.
It also means General Manager Pat Mulroy is getting more aggressive in plans to pipe in drinking water from sources other than the Colorado River.
Mulroy said, “The point I was making today is that we have run out of options. We have run out of time to ring our hands about it and try to delay it. If we do that we are putting our own families and our own security in jeopardy.”
I’ll tell you something else that gets worse all the time: the level of English usage. You don’t “ring” your hands; you “wring” your hands.
To quote a wag at another website, “Free yourself, brother, from the tyranny of the Spellcheck!”
Of course, newspapers used to have editors and proofreaders, too.
Until around the 80s, it would have been literally unthinkable to allow copy to go to press with glaring errors. I mean, the newspapers would have been ASHAMED that their staff couldn’t write.
It was so unthinkable that they paid people a halfway decent wage to make to check this stuff.