Was Lake Mead a Mistake?

The dams built along the Colorado River some hundred years ago paved the way for Western cities to boom. Las Vegas wouldn’t exist without Lake Mead, our nation’s largest reservoir. But these dams came with a cost: environmental impact, cultural loss, and fraught political battles.

So as Western states stare down a deadline for figuring out our Colorado River allocation, we gotta ask: Was the creation of Lake Mead… a mistake?

Today, co-host Dayvid Figler sits down with UNLV hydrology professor David Kreamer to talk about the mistakes we made when damming the river first started, the salty agricultural mayhem the dam created downriver, and what needs to change if we’re going to keep Lake Mead, after all.

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