Mobile UPI  |   About UPI  |   UPI en Español  |   UPI Arabic  |   UPIU  |   My Account
Search:
Go

Should Las Vegas get Snake Valley water?

|
|
 
  
Published: Nov. 26, 2008 at 1:13 AM

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 26 (UPI) -- Piping water from the Snake Valley aquifer on the border between Utah and Nevada to Las Vegas could do irreparable harm, environmentalists say.

In a letter Monday to U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a coalition of 23 organizations said that four agencies under his department, including the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, should lodge protests against the plan, the Deseret Morning News reported. The groups said that the department may have caved in to political pressure when its agencies failed to protest the Southern Nevada Water Authority's application to draw water from central Nevada.

"We believe these actions constituted an abrogation of the responsibility of those agencies to preserve and protect the environmental resources within their jurisdictions and the interests of the tribes and people they serve," Great Basin Water Network coordinator Susan Lynn said.

The Utah Association of Counties plans to adopt a resolution aimed at the Interior Department. Officials say that starving the Snake Valley of water could harm distant areas in Utah as dust blows across the state.

Topics: Dirk Kempthorne
© 2008 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.

Order reprints
  
Join the conversation
Most Popular Collections
Notable deaths of 2012 Scripps National Spelling Bee AmfAR Cinema Against AIDS gala
Indianapolis 500 Presidential Medal of Freedom Memorial Day around the nation
Additional Top News Stories
1 of 27
Snigdha Nandipati of San Diego wins Finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee
View Caption
Snigdha Nandipati of San Diego, California watches confetti rain down as she wins the two-day Scripps National Spelling Bee championship, May 31, 2012, in National Harbor, Maryland. Nandipati successfully spelled the word .* guetapens *, meaning to lure or ambush. UPI/Mike Theiler
fark
Photoshop this power tower technician
Driving drunk and unlicensed, with a kid not even buckled let alone in a safety seat, en route to...
Man killed in Spencer fire. The lava lamps must have ignited the blacklight posters
Passenger jet crashes into apartment building in Nigerian capitol. Over 150 princes, bank officials,...
I'll see your zombie apocalypse, and raise you "swarms of deadly spiders" invading a town in India...
Photoshop this woman at the wheel