This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Las Vegas wants to pump ground water out of counties to its north and send it to Sin City through 306 miles of pipelines. Utah has a dog in this fight because plummeting water tables in Nevada could cause vegetation to die, sending dust clouds roaring into the Wasatch Front. Sucking 177,000 acre-feet of water a year out of the Great Basin aquifer would damage plant and animal life across the west desert, particularly in Snake Valley, which straddles the state line. That amount, by the way, is roughly half the capacity of Jordanelle Reservoir.
Anything that would compound drought in the Great Basin is a bad idea. But how bad is debatable.
Officials in Nevada are evaluating petitions by Las Vegas water authorities for ground water rights in the northern counties. In the meantime, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has issued a draft environmental impact statement on the proposed project's effects on federal lands. It's a sobering document.
The study estimates that the project would add 24,122 tons of windblown dust a year into the air during the project's first 75 years. Obviously, it would take a certain amount of time before the impacts of massive ground water pumping would be seen.
The study also estimates that ground water discharges to surface evaporation and transpiration by plants would be reduced by 28 percent in Snake Valley during the first 75 years and by 48 percent in the larger Great Salt Lake desert flow system. Over a 200-year period, those impacts would increase by another 5 percentage points.
In some parts of Snake Valley in Utah, water tables can be expected to fall between 50 and 100 feet during the initial 75 years of the project. Over two centuries, those impacts would get worse.
Of course, experts will differ about the modeling used in the study. Some will say impacts will be worse than the study's models predict. Others may say they would be less drastic. However, experts need time to evaluate the study. The public comment period now is only 90 days. That seems short for a study whose executive summary alone runs to 75 pages.
Two years ago, officials in Utah and Nevada proposed an agreement to divide water rights in the Snake Valley between the two states and monitor the impacts of pumping. We question whether, once a pipeline system is built, the negative impacts of pumping could ever be addressed equitably.
The BLM's study only magnifies those concerns.