@Thomas Stearn "I was gonna ask you, and Hal perhaps, how water supply is organised where you live? Is the supply constant or is it suspended sometimes given that there is so little rain? Is there a pipe system and is the pressure high enough for washing machines? I can only hope that my questions are not too naive and provoking." Quite the opposite: your questions are appreciated, and I can understand their origin, given the fact that nearly no rain falls here. Water in the Desert Southwest is in some places quite abundant both above and below ground. Those places became well-known and well charted by the early Settlers. Later, as cities grew, and the year-round growing climate became exploited, great expanses of desert were converted into croplands. In the area where we lived outside Phoenix, Arizona, the Gila River Indians lease their land for crop growing purposes. Their location does not share the great irrigation system developed long ago, but depends on deep-well produced water, some wells being over 1000 feet deep. Here is a picture of a typical irrigation well in operation, smaller than most we saw there: It consists of a big vertically-mounted electric motor turning a shaft extending clear down to the depths of the well, where a submersible pump can develop the high pressure needed to lift the water to such height, the pressure may be 500 pounds per square inch. We tried extending our hands into that 12-inch diameter stream of water, and the force was unimaginable! This method of water production is very costly compared to the reservoir-irrigation method so much more prevalent. The water shown would not be potable, too high, usually, in nitrates and other salts. Cotton crops love it! The largest irrigation operation in Arizona begins in the mountains northeast of Phoenix, where Roosevelt Dam impounds snow-melt water forming Roosevelt Lake: This dam was completed in 1911, the lake covers 21,000 acres, and has a shoreline 128 miles in perimeter, it's maximum depth is 188 feet, compared to Lake Mead's 500+ feet. A complete story is here: https://www.srpnet.com/water/dams/roosevelt.aspx The company managing this is Salt River Project, SRP. From Roosevelt Dam, water is allowed to flow downgrade to several additional dams, finally entering a system of irrigation channels and ditches. I am searching through some saved things, and will add to this later. Frank
I do hope this proves legible. It's a map, rather large, I saved from somewhere years ago, showing the extent of the Salt River Project which supplies irrigation and domestic water to millions of people. Roosevelt Lake, primary source of the water is at upper right. The Salt River, an original riverbed which meanders downward, passing through central Phoenix and then westward for many miles until it meets the Gila River, flowing from the southeast, the combination forming a huge normally-dry lake-bed called Nelson Lake. In 1978, extremely heavy rainfall overwhelmed the project with a "l00-year rain" which caused the SRP to release vast amounts of water into the Salt River. Incredibly, against all odds, this rain event repeated again in 1979 and 1980! We had moved there from Indiana in June, 1979. The flood which occurred just 6 months later destroyed all but 2 of the roadway bridges across the Salt River. The resulting traffic jams were incredible, lasting for weeks, until SRP could safely "turn off" the water. We saw massive objects being carried by the river, tree trunks, car bodies, any movable debris. The peak flow rate was 180,000 cubic feet per second, 1,260,000 gallons per second! The normally dry riverbed looked like this:
Many thanks, @Frank Sanoica , for going to great lengths to answer my questions. I read that with great interest. I was also asking because your house seems so secluded as was shown by the photos you posted, so that I assumed you may be living in a sparsely populated area. In those areas you would see quite a number of homesteads even here where I live which just have their own well and domestic waterworks even though they don't live in a desert. So I wouldn't have been surprised if water was not piped to people's homes in a desert region. I always admire the art of engineering exhibited way back by our ancestors when they had to make basic decisions such as organising water supply.
I go to Vegas a lot. Adverage rainfall about 3 inches a year Surpassed in March this year. In fact the homless people living in their massive storm drains lost everything. The Vid was from last year when it was dryish
@Tom Galty If you are able to, and have not done so already, drive west out of Vegas on Charleston Blvd, where it begins to head southward, about 10 miles out, stop and look back towards the city: you will note the entire place lies far below you. The trip continues if you like, through Blue Diamond, and returns you back to town via Blue Diamond Rd., which laid west of town when I lived there, likely populated by now. One can perceive that Las Vegas, the city, lies at the very bottom of a huge trough, into which all the rain falling on those thousands of acres of mountains and foothills must drain into that trough, which explains the common flooding there. 1/2 inch of rain is enough to flood the city! Most of the floodwater eventually drains into Lake Mead, via Las Vegas Wash. In July, 1975, we had an unusually large storm pass through. Mid-afternoon, the news was showing massive flooding on the Vegas Strip, so I ran down there, using my knowledge of all the back-street byways, and took the first two pictures in Caesar's Palace parking lot. The people had parked their vehicles in a clearly-marked flash flood channel, and the raging waters did amazing damage to many. In the second, the blue van, which had been rolled a number of times, had New York license plates! The pic below was out of the newspaper: The storm of that July destroyed the small mining town of Nelson, southeast of Vegas perhaps 40 miles. Great video, by the way! Thank you! Frank