Lake Mead is going down faster than money in the stock market. According to the Focus, Lake Mead has lost 6.48 million acre feet just this year. An acre foot is equivalent to about the same size of an eight lane swimming pool- 82 feet long- 52 feet wide- 10 feet deep.  With this rapid decrease, activities in the lake are being affected. Especially for boat owners. 

Senior Jeffry Collins says, “My family had to sell our boat because there was only one place left to drop it in the water.”

Other than people not being able to do activities in the lake there’s another thing that has been occurring. The more the lake dries up, the more dead bodies there are.  NewsWeek says just this year there have been five dead bodies found. Some of these bodies only date back to 25 years ago. With this happening many people have wondered what this shows about the lake in the past. 

“When I went to the lake a couple weeks ago the water line was 200 feet above the water,” sophomore Cooper Bishop stated.

While this loss of water affects the lake it also has been affecting the states that rely on this lake.  California, Nevada, and Arizona are all affected by this. Once the lake dries up  MSN says there will no longer be water and electricity supplied to any of these states. This will mean that Las Vegas will have to rely on another power source to provide power to LV and the strip. 

While this rapid decrease seems sudden, there might be an explanation. In 2016, a deal was made between the Colorado and the Denver water district. According to the Colorado Sun the deal proposed was that every year Colorado would pump about 1.3 million acre feet of water to the Denver water district. This would mean that the lake would lose about 10% of its water. This is contributing to the problem at hand.

Another problem for this lake is that no matter how much people try to conserve water, every year more and more people are going to need the lake. With construction in LV being at an all time high and the population in the valley being over 2 million people, many have started to wonder if the lake will ever go back to normal.

Junior Kayden Bailey says “I never realized the lake was this close to running out.”