So Hot In The Valley

I've been complaining how hot Las Vegas has become, literally hot with temperatures reaching 120degF on the peak of summer. This year's summer is no exception. Although we are still to see the temperature to reach the 120deg levels but right now it easily reached 111degF so far. Since the year that I arrived here in the city that I considered my second home, the entire Las Vegas valley is in serious drought condition. The Colorado River which supplies water to all the states it ran through like Nevada and Arizona faces the worst on record. Since 2000 Lake Mead, a man-made lake and the largest water reservoir in the United States, dropped its water level by approximately 100 feet. The Water Authority and its agencies adopted a Water Resource Plan to meet the demands during this time of shortage. The entire community was encouraged to adopt water conservation steps and the Water Authority even gave incentives to those households who were able to save significant water usage.

Some of the recommended steps were the following:

• Apply Xeriscaping to lawns and gardens. Xeriscaping refers to landscaping and gardening in ways that reduce or eliminate the use of supplemental irrigation. Transforming ones lawn or garden to be water efficient could receive a hefty incentive from the Water Authorities.
  
• Turf limitations. When installing a landscape to a new home, homeowners and construction companies should check the turf limit in a particular area to ensure that the code requirements are met.
  
• Mandatory water restrictions. Wherever we live in Las Vegas, we belong to a certain water restriction zone and being assigned with a watering schedule for our lawns and gardens. We will be cited and slapped with a water-waste fee for using our garden sprinklers outside the assigned watering days. During the months of May through October, additional watering restrictions were implemented. We should not irrigate our gardens and lawns between 11am and 7pm. This is the time of the day where it is the hottest and the water will just evaporate quickly before being absorbed into the soil.
  
• Use carwash facilities instead of washing your car in your own residence. This would help prevent draining our water reservoir. By using a water smart carwash facility and with a minimal fee, the waste water will be treated and returned back to Lake Mead.
  

There are many ways of conserving water all throughout the household and those being recommended by the authorities but the most common that I myself been following is to have my car washed in a carwash facility. Our household doesn't have a considerable lawn that uses much water but we still follow our designated water schedule days.

Could this be the result of Global Warming? Maybe there are less snow caps being formed from the north during the winter that when it melts, they could not supply enough water to the Colorado River thereby reducing the water levels in Lake Mead. It's a given fact that we live in the middle of Mohave Desert and therefore water conservation is already a way of life in this part of the country.

An embedded video is showing my car in a carwash facility.