Thursday, March 20, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
Las Vegas native Norma Cox called for local government agencies to work together to solve the valley's growing water quality and quantity problems.
Growth that could boost the population to 2 million by 2005 and add to sewage discharge and runoff woes prompted a call to action from 43 people attending the local site of a national teleconference Wednesday.
"One critical problem is the lack of integration between agencies," Cox said Wednesday at the conference sponsored by the League of Women Voters and UNLV's Environmental Studies program.
While the Southern Nevada Water Authority is searching for ways to reuse wastewater and to protect ground water quality, everyone ignores storm runoff, Cox said. And those floodwaters run straight into Lake Mead, from which 85 percent of Southern Nevada's drinking water comes.
While Clark County receives on average of 4 inches of rain a year, if none of it evaporated, the runoff could reach 350,000 acre-feet from a storm delivering 4 inches of rain. Nevada receives 300,000 acre-feet a year from the Colorado River.
Runoff carries anything on the valley's surface, including soils contaminated with bacteria, oil, chemicals, pesticides and other hazards, said Kathleen Truman of UNLV Environmental Studies. "The more pavement, the more runoff goes into the (Las Vegas) Wash," she said. "And the stuff on my street is something I wouldn't want in the water. It's pretty nasty stuff."
To prevent such a threat to the lake, Cox and biologist Larry Paulson urged officials to capture floodwaters in abandoned gravel pits near the Las Vegas Wash and to restore wetlands lost from serious floods in the past 20 years.
First, public waters needed protection from algae and nitrogen and phosphorous, Paulson said. Water officials face complicated organisms such as cryptosporidium, which killed 43 residents in 1994.
Southern Nevada has always returned every drop of Colorado River water to earn credits for drawing extra drinking water, said Paulson, who has studied the lake for 20 years. Trouble is, the wastewater outflows are six miles upstream from the drinking water intake.
"Lake Mead on the whole is very pristine," Paulson said, "but returning flows have to be dispersed to dilute wastewater."
Nursing some of the 2,000 acres of the lost desert wetlands back to life can help solve problems from pollution and pests, he said, problems without an engineered solution.
"Every time you come up with another engineering solution, you create another biological problem," Paulson said.
One of the biggest problems for water officials nationwide lies in educating elected officials to help solve the problem by planning land use to prevent polluting drinking water, said Jon Witten of Horsley and Witten Inc. of Boston, a firm dedicated to land-use planning.
The link between how land is used and the water supply is crucial, he said.
"It always amazes me that health boards and other government bodies are the last to realize this," Witten said.
"Maybe anyone serving on a regulatory board -- from county commission to state level -- should take a course to understand the link between land use and water quality."
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