Nevada's Largest Reservoir Is Drying Up — Here's the $1.5 Billion Fix

There is a white ring running around the walls of Lake Mead. It looks like a bathtub that hasn't been cleaned in years. Pale mineral deposits, baked into the rock by decades of sun, marking the waterline of a lake that used to reach much higher than it does today. From above, it reads like a scar. On the ground, standing at the shoreline, it reads like a warning. Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States. It was full in 1983. It has not been full since. Since 2000, the water level has dropped by roughly 160 feet. The lake that once held 26 million acre-feet of water — enough to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania in a foot of water — currently holds about 8.3 million. Thirty percent of capacity. Twenty-five million people depend on it for water. Las Vegas draws 90% of everything that comes out of its taps from this lake. The farms of Arizona and California draw from the same source. So does a significant portion of northern Mexico. Hoover Dam, which created this lake in 1936, generates electricity for homes and businesses across Nevada, Arizona, and California. As the water has dropped, so has its output — by roughly a third since the lake was last healthy. And the lake is still dropping. At the bottom of this reservoir, there is a threshold called dead pool. At 895 feet above sea level, the water falls too low to pass through the dam. No flow downstream. No hydropower. For the cities and farms that have built entire water systems around what comes out the other side of Hoover Dam, dead pool is not an engineering term. It is an existential one. Las Vegas saw this coming. Twenty years ago, the city made a $1.5 billion bet that the lake would keep falling — and built the infrastructure to survive it. That infrastructure is running right now, today, as the lake sits at levels it has not seen since the 1930s. This is the story of how the Colorado River reached this point, what dead pool actually means for the American Southwest, and the engineering project that is keeping one desert city alive while the water disappears around it. Thank you for watching: Nevada's Largest Reservoir Is Drying Up — Here's the $1.5 Billion Fix #lakemead #hooverdam #watercrisis With great passion for mega constructions I created this channel. With extensive and detailed research as well as impressive video editing, I want to make the most fascinating mega constructions worldwide accessible to you - for all those who are just as enthusiastic about constructions. Subscribe and welcome to the Signum Team!