More Snow Melt

Where has all the water gone?

This is my response to "Invalid Item"  prompt Friday, April 24, 2009: Discuss anything related to water or the ocean.

Where has all the water gone? The obvious answer is down the drain. We are having a drought here in Nevada. All right, this is a desert and we don’t get a lot of rain under normal conditions, except during the monsoon season. Unfortunately, for the past few years the monsoon season has produced little to no rain.

Lake Mead appears to be drying up. Actually, what is happening is there is little snowmelt in the mountains so the runoff into Lake Mead is down. Because of the drought, people are encouraged to save water. The water authority gives tickets gives to people wasting water. You can even get a ticket for washing your car in your driveway if water runs into the street.

Of course, who wants to wash there car when they can go to a car wash. Especially, since the car washes give rain checks; they will rewash the car again free if it rains within 24 hours of getting the car washed. All though, I suppose in a drought a rain check isn’t going to make any difference since its not raining anyway.

The weird thing about rain and Las Vegas is that it can rain in one section of town and not in another. The official rain gage for the city is at McCarron Air Port, so the only rain that the weather people count is at McCarron. In other words, it can flood in one section of town, but not rain at McCarron so the rain in the flooded section of town isn’t official.

All right, let’s face living in Las Vegas is interesting. We have bill boards warning people not to drive through deep water on flooded streets (when it rains here, it floods), buy every time there are flood streets there are news helicopters filming the rescue helicopters taking people off the roves of cars and vans stalled in flood waters.