Kay Brothers, Deputy General Manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, calls it quits this week and heads for the retirement village.
Emily Green has an excellent post about Brothers and her legacy, Kay Sera Sera. You should read the article, because Brothers' tenure at SNWA is not solely one of pipelines and pumping. She was a major force behind the aquifer storage program in the Las Vegas Valley in the 1980s and 1990s.
But as Emily indicates, she will be remembered by many as the Justifier-in-Chief for the pipeline project that would bring groundwater from rural Nevada to Las Vegas. Unlike her boss Pat Mulroy, Brothers was a technical person: she held an engineering degree from New Mexico Tech.
Emily provides some of Brothers' more memorable statements on behalf of the pipeline project [emboldening mine]:
1. The SNWA project is not comparable to Owens Valley because Owens Valley targeted surface water and the five-basin Las Vegas pipeline targets groundwater. I love this one -unassailable logic!
2. Consequences such as the dust storms out of Owens Valley are impossible because the Las Vegas project would have to meet the review standards of the National Environmental Policy Act. Almost as good!
3. Though some plants whose roots now anchor soil in target valleys would die, the agency would leave enough vegetation to prevent dust storms. Successor vegetation in valleys affected by pumping would also serve that purpose. But she just said dust storms are impossible.
4. Unacceptable environmental impacts from pumping heavily throughout the Great Basin would be averted by stopping and starting pumps in various locations. Gotcha!
5. Las Vegas would stop pumping if damage was noticed by monitoring committees. Uh-huh.
6. Models capable of predicting damage before pumping were not useful because they didn’t take into account all the water that she would capture through stream diversion that would otherwise be lost to evaporation once it reached baking playas. WTF?
7. She could get any project permitted. I suspect she's right.
Wonder what's in store for SNWA and their pipeline dream?
"Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion" - Richard Feynman
But your headline appeals to the cognoscenti, whereas mine is geared to the 'Jersey Shore' set.
Great story, by the way.
Posted by: Michael | Tuesday, 04 May 2010 at 09:46 PM
I far prefer your headline!
Posted by: Emily Green | Tuesday, 04 May 2010 at 08:55 PM