Nevada Official Wants to Completely Drain Lake Powell!
A dramatic solution on how to fill Lake Mead is gaining popularity, and now a Clark County commissioner has agreed with the idea.
Lake Mead in Nevada and Arizona and Lake Powell in Utah and Arizona have suffered from a regional drought for many years, and excessive water usage is slowly emptying the Colorado River a lot faster than natural weather patterns can fill it. The struggle to smuggle some water has people scared. An above-average snowfall and excessive precipitation in the spring have bolstered the water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, but many officials believe the reservoirs will never return to full capacity.
Drought and excessive water use have severely impacted water levels in the Colorado River, which has lost over 10 trillion gallons of water over 21 years. The issue has pushed some organizations to pursue a solution called Fill Mead First, which would save Lake Mead by draining Lake Powell, and the idea recently gained steam when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation accepted public comments on the future of the Colorado River.
The Glen Canyon Institute, which has urged the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to construct tunnels for originally proposed the idea the Colorado River to completely bypass the Glen Canyon dam—therefore eliminating Lake Powell. The Glen Canyon Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to restoring Glen Canyon.
Thousands of comments about potential solutions have since poured into the Bureau of Reclamation. The Fill Mead First proposal—draining Lake Powell to fill Lake Mead by allowing the Colorado River to bypass the Glen Canyon Dam—united nine organizations and gained the support of Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom, who signed the document on behalf of the Las Vegas Water Defender, according to a report by Fox.
Segerblom said at first that "crazy environmentalists" were the ones advocating for the proposal, but it is now gaining popularity among business owners.
"Obviously, they have an interest in having water. When you finally look at the basis for the dam and the lake, we realize that it should have never been built," Segerblom said. "If we get rid of it, that's going to give us more water in the bottom states."
Newsweek reached out to Segerblom and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation via email for comment.
AI Chatbots Are Invading Your Local Government!?!
THE UNITED STATES Environmental Protection Agency blocked its employees from accessing ChatGPT while the US State Department staff in Guinea used it to create speeches and social media posts.
Generative AI is being used by governments to streamline routine paperwork and improve the public’s ability to access and understand dense government material. The US Environmental Protection Agency blocked its employees from accessing ChatGPT, while the US State Department staff in Guinea used it to draft speeches and social media posts. Maine banned its executive branch employees from using generative artificial intelligence for the rest of the year out of concern for the state’s cybersecurity. In nearby Vermont, government workers are using it to learn new programming languages and write internal-facing code. The city of San Jose, California, wrote 23 pages of guidelines on generative AI and requires municipal employees to fill out a form every time they use a tool like ChatGPT, Bard, or Midjourney. Alameda County’s government has held sessions to educate employees about generative AI’s risks but doesn’t see the need yet for a formal policy. County staff are “doing a lot of their written work using ChatGPT,” says Sybil Gurney, Alameda County’s assistant chief information officer.
An anonymous person says: "We need to get the government to do their jobs. They shouldn't be getting our taxes for this."
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