Bellagio Fountains Blast as Vegas Glitz Obscures Drought
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The Bellagio Fountains gush 460 feet (140.2 meters) high every 15 minutes nightly. Golf courses carpet the desert, as they have since Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack played Las Vegas. And the casino restaurants still serve water without asking.
The 2 million residents and 43 million visitors a year in the Las Vegas area might never know that their principal water supply, Lake Mead on the Colorado River, is almost the lowest since Hoover Dam created it in 1936. Engineers are boring through rock in an $817 million race to lower the city’s water intake to keep up with the sinking lake level.