KVIG Informative

Nevada settlers split the Virgin Valley’s water supply 60-40 between Mesquite and Bunkerville with a physical wall inside a 1933 storage tank. Sixty years later, the Nevada Legislature chartered a public water district that inherited the same 60-40 split as its ownership structure, and that structure still governs the utility supplying a fast-growing Nevada border town today, even as pending applications for tens of thousands more acre-feet show how tight that century-old math has become.

Water rights on the lower Virgin River trace to a 1927 court decree that confirmed appropriations dating to 1905: the Bunkerville Irrigation Company holds rights to 8,116 acre-feet a year and the Mesquite Irrigation Company holds rights to 9,670 acre-feet a year, both under that 1905 priority date, according to a water-resources summary prepared for the Nevada Legislature’s Interim Committee. Unlike the Colorado River, the Virgin River is not governed by any interstate compact, even though it flows through Utah, Arizona and Nevada, according to the same legislative summary.

The valley’s piped water system started small. The first well in the valley was drilled on the school grounds in Mesquite in 1930, reaching 300 feet deep, though its water carried too many dissolved solids for anything but school restrooms, according to the Virgin Valley Water District’s own history. In 1933, the Soil Conservation Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps helped local residents develop a mountain spring, build a small dam and construct a storage facility known as Three Mile Tank, connected by pipe to Bunkerville High School and ten homes, the district says. A wall built inside Three Mile Tank physically divided the water 60 percent to Mesquite and 40 percent to Bunkerville, according to the district’s account.

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints funded waterlines running from Three Mile Tank to both communities in 1938, according to the water district’s history. Each community’s water association built out its own rudimentary distribution system through the mid-to-late 1940s using asbestos cement pipe, a substitute forced by steel shortages during World War II, the district says.

The Nevada Legislature created the Virgin Valley Water District in 1993, merging the Mesquite Farmstead Water Association and the Bunkerville Water User’s Association into a single public utility — with the Mesquite association contributing 60 percent of the combined water rights and the Bunkerville association contributing 40 percent, according to the district’s own history. The ratio matched the split first drawn inside the walls of Three Mile Tank six decades earlier.

Naturally occurring arsenic in the district’s groundwater ranges from 5 to 86 micrograms per liter, according to the district’s own water-quality reporting. After the Environmental Protection Agency lowered the maximum allowable arsenic level to 10 micrograms per liter effective January 2006, the district built five arsenic treatment systems with a combined capacity of 12,100 gallons per minute, according to the district. A Nevada legislative water-resources summary put the project’s cost at $23.3 million, completed in November 2009, cutting treated arsenic levels down to a range of 1.7 to 4.4 micrograms per liter.

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The Southern Nevada Water Authority now holds the largest single claim on the lower Virgin River’s surface flow, an average annual diversion of about 113,000 acre-feet drawn on a seasonal schedule between October and May, according to the legislative water-resources summary. The Virgin Valley Water District separately holds 12,039 acre-feet a year in permitted and certificated groundwater rights for municipal and industrial use — and has a pending application for another 65,158 acre-feet a year, the same summary shows, a request roughly five times the district’s current certificated groundwater supply.

The Virgin Valley Water District now serves roughly 17,000 people from a mix of groundwater wells, Virgin River surface water and mountain springs, according to the district’s own account of its water portfolio. The 60-40 split first marked by a wall inside a storage tank in 1933 is still, on paper, how the public utility supplying one of Nevada’s fastest-growing border towns is structured.