Las Vegas's new strategy for tackling drought – banning 'useless grass':
A new Nevada law will outlaw about 40% of the grass in the Las Vegas area in an effort to conserve water amid a drought that is drying up the region's primary water source: the Colorado River.
Other cities and states around the US have enacted temporary bans on lawns that must be watered, but legislation signed Friday by the state's governor, Steve Sisolak, makes Nevada the first in the nation to enact a permanent ban on certain categories of grass. Sisolak said last week that anyone flying into Las Vegas viewing the "bathtub rings" that delineate how high Lake Mead's water levels used to be can see that conservation is needed.
"It's incumbent upon us for the next generation to be more conscious of conservation and our natural resources, water being particularly important," he said.
The ban targets what the Southern Nevada Water Authority calls "non-functional turf". It applies to grass that virtually no one uses at office parks, street medians and the entrances to housing developments. It excludes single-family homes, parks and golf courses.
The measure will require the replacement of about 8 sq miles (21 sq km) of grass in the metro Las Vegas area. By ripping it out, water officials estimate the region can reduce annual water consumption by 15% and save about 14 gallons (53 liters) per person a day in a region with a population of about 2.3 million.
If you want grass, go live where grass grows naturally.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday June 10 2021, @10:25PM (2 children)
Couldn't a lot of those issues just be explained by the large influx of people? A hundred years or so ago Las Vegas barely even existed and today there is like 600k people there? Year by year they just urbanize more and more. The town(s) clearly wasn't made for this. It's not that there are not large desert cities around the world but they are either shitholes or next to or close to large bodies of water of some kind be it sea/ocean/rivers or some gigantic aquifer. So what the hell happened to the Colorado and/or Lake Mead? It can't all just be drought or to hot, isn't it just to many people grabbing water from the same source?
Still a "rock lawn" makes sense in a desert, if you need something green grow cacti or something. It's not just for desert folks, my father ripped out part of the lawn a few years ago cause he was tired of spending all the time cutting and maintaining it. There is still a patch so he can sit outside and feel the grass and it can look nice but it's very small and it's totally square and with no objects in it so it can all be managed by the robo-cutter. All things that are not plants and trees was replaced by gravel and I think it looks quite nice. It's not green but it looks nice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @05:58AM
Yes, but here in Seattle we had hundreds of thousands move to the region and still wound up net negative versus our water consumption from 20 years earlier through conservation efforts. That's both total and per capita reduction, so they shouldn't be up that much just due to increases in population alone. It's presumably the new residents expecting to waste water like the previous inhabitants and the previous inhabitants also not cutting back to something reasonable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12 2021, @06:15PM
mostly mexican invaders