There’s hope for Lake Mead

Lower consumption holds off federal shortage declarations

A late-season surge of rain and snow melt made a bad year better for the Colorado River, but it wasn’t enough to lift Lake Mead out of record-low territory.

The reservoir that supplies 90 percent of the Las Vegas Valley’s drinking water bottomed out at 1,071.61 feet above sea level on July 1, its lowest level since May 1937, when the lake was filling for the first time behind a newly completed Hoover Dam.

Though the surface of the lake has ticked back up by about 2 feet since then, it remains 5 feet lower than it was at this time last year and 43 feet lower than it was in early August 2012. But the news isn’t all bad. The amount of water being drawn from the Colorado River for use in Nevada, Arizona and California is on track to hit its lowest level in more than 20 years, a sign that conservation efforts and temporary cuts by river users are having an effect, at least on the demand side of the ledger.

“That’s less water that’s leaving Lake Mead,” said Bronson Mack, spokesman for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the valley’s wholesale water supplier.

If the current federal projection holds, the three lower basin states will combine this year to consume less than 7 million acre-feet of Colorado River water for the first time since 1992.

That’s a “symbolically important milestone,” said author and long-time environmental journalist John Fleck, because the region’s population has grown by roughly 7 million people since the last time consumption was this low.

“We’ve reached a turning point where population is going up and water use is going down,” said Fleck, who was just named director of the Water Resources Program at

JERRY HENKEL/LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL The “bathtub ring” can be seen at the Boulder Basin Las Vegas Boat Harbor Thursday at Lake Mead. The ring shows the effects of drought.