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| Celebrating 25 Years of the MVWD | |||
| The Moapa Valley Domestic Water System Is Established | |||
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| By Vernon Robison Moapa Valley Progress Submitted July 16, 2008 This month the Moapa Valley Water District (MVWD) celebrates its 25th anniversary. This is a significant landmark in the community. However, it should be noted that the story of culinary water management in the Moapa Valley goes further back than 25 years and also stretches well before us into the future. The following is the first in a series of articles dealing with that story. A major element in the history of any settlement in the desert Southwest |
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is water. In the hot, rocky landscape of the Mojave desert, human settlement would be impossible without an adequate water supply. This is certainly true of the Moapa Valley. The green ribbon of marshes which lies on either side of the Muddy River as it stretches across the arid desert has been a welcome site to human settlers for centuries. The source of water for the Moapa Valley is the network of artesian springs which bubble up from a deep underground source onto the green grasslands in the upper area of the valley known as Warm Springs. This spring water runs down the valley through the Muddy River until it eventually flows into Lake Mead and there joins the Colorado River system. The spring water at the head of the Muddy has always been steady and uninterrupted as long as records have been kept and has not, up to now, been affected by drought or by flood. The early white settlers to the area developed a complex system of irrigation ditches to bring water from the river to water their crops. These settlers also used the water from these irrigation ditches for culinary purposes. They stored water in barrels near their homes or in large underground concrete cisterns. Ditchwater, however, was probably not the best for drinking. So around 1930, the Union Pacific Railroad began allowing local farmers in the Logandale area to fill cans of water from a tank of Las Vegas water brought in by train for the railroad section crew. Folks would go to the Logandale Section House located at the west end of Liston Avenue to fill up their containers with drinking water. This practice continued for about twenty years. During these early days, rudimentary household water delivery systems were developed in the Moapa Valley. Concrete settling tanks were constructed in both Overton and Logandale. Water was pumped from irrigation ditches into these tanks. After the particulate matter was allowed to settled, the water flowed out through low-pressure lines to the various homes in the communities. Organizations were eventually formed to manage and improve these systems. The Overton Water District was established in 1954. It’s founding board members were Mack Lyon, Bob Waymire, Wallace Jones and Sy Porter; with Secretary, Wayne Robertson. A second organization was formed a couple of years later to service the communities north of the Overton District. This organization was called the Moapa Valley Water Company. It’s founding board members were Reuben Whipple, Mac McCormick, Grant Bowler, Dell Robison and Edwin Wells; with Elaine Whipple as secretary. In 1960 a joint agreement was made between these two entities to contract, operate and maintain a valley-wide culinary water system. This system would bring water from Warm Springs all the way through the valley to all the households in the community. A small spring on a hillside at Taylor’s Ranch in Warm Springs was selected as the source of water for the system. Local resident, Francis Taylor was very interested in this project. He deeded the one acre of land where the spring was located to the joint operating entities. Surveys were done and plans were made for a seventeen mile flow line to be constructed from that site throughout the valley. A bid was granted to Stratton Brothers of Hurricane, Utah and the flow line was completed on October 7, 1960. Almost immediately there were problems with the new line. The low-pressure line was built out of 8” thin-wall plastic pipe. Breaks in the line began to occur even before the system was put into service. Then, only a month later, disaster struck. On November 6, 1960, before the system had even been fully placed in operation, a flood destroyed 4200 feet of the line above Wells Siding north of Logandale. This set the project back for a couple of years. Additional funding had to be secured and large portions of the pipeline had to be replaced with better quality pipe. |
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In 1961, Logandale resident Jay Whipple was hired as the general manager of the two water companies. Whipple was a Moapa Valley native. He had been working for some time for a construction company. But it was a feast-or-famine kind of living. Jay Whipple passed away in 2004, but his widow, Elaine, remembers how difficult it was for him to make a living in construction because it wasn’t always steady work. “He’d have a lot of work and keep really busy for 4-5 months, but then the work would run out for a while,” she said. “He was looking for a more steady job when he was offered the job at the Water Company. And he got just what he was looking for: really steady work!” |
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For the next thirty years, Jay Whipple became synonymous with the water company. Especially in the early days, Whipple and his wife (the company’s first secretary) did nearly all of the work of the company from reading the meters and pipeline repair to billing. “Pretty soon we had people who were honestly surprised to find that Jay didn’t own the company,” said Elaine. “In a lot of ways he really was the company.” The water company operated on a shoestring budget in those early days. Upon taking the job, Elaine reports that the only company assets that Jay was given to work with included an “old broken down backhoe, a truck that didn’t run, a shovel and a pair of irrigation boots.” Jay went to work in repairing the washed out flow line, replacing that portion with new pipe. By January, 1963, the line was in full service again. But the system was still prone to breaks throughout the valley. He received calls at all hours of the day to make repairs on the pipeline. Elaine remembered that Ruth Leavitt, a resident at the high end of the water line at Cottonwood Lane would be the first one to lose water when the faulty old pipe would break on her street. “It was always on the fourth of July and the hottest day of the year when Ruth would call because she was out of water,” Elaine recalls. “For several years I don’t think that Jay ever celebrated the Fourth of July, only down in a mud hole fixing pipe.” During the ensuing years, Jay oversaw the replacement, update and repair of much of the old system. A new, larger pipeline was eventually constructed from Warm Springs. In the mid-1970s, the portion of the water line that passed through the Muddy River narrows above Logandale was rerouted out of the riverbed and up over the hill along the power lines. This prevented the line from being washed out again by floods. Also a back-up water supply was developed from a well on Wells Avenue in Logandale. The well water was considered too hard to drink, but it was used as a backup when service went down in the main line from Warm Springs. “Jay did a lot of very innovative things,” remembered long-time Water District Board member, Glen Hardy. “In those days, things were more open to innovation. But he got the pipeline built in the most economical way. He didn’t bother with a lot of red tape, he just got it done.” For eighteen years, all of the business of the water company took place right at the Whipple home in Logandale. Elaine set up an office in a hallway room of the house. She sent all of the water bills out from that office. The Whipples shared their PO Box as well as their telephone with the water company. But the couple paid the full expense for both of them. The Whipple barn in the back of the house became the water company shop and supply yard. Folks came to the barn when they needed pipe to repair or install lines to their property. “We didn’t have anyone to tend the barn, so people just wrote their names and what they took on a clipboard out there,” Elaine said. “Then we’d bill them for it later.” Elaine reported that the Moapa Valley Water company started with about 175-180 customers. The Overton Water District had around 200 customers. The billing for the Overton customers was done by secretary, Wayne Robertson. The base water rate at that time was $9 per family with a special $6 rate offered to the widows in the community. As the community grew through the 1970s, the water company business became too much for the Whipple home, Elaine said. In 1979, the office of the company moved out of their home. The water office eventually ended up at a new building on Moapa Valley Blvd next to the current LDS Hinckley Chapel. “They got a nice new office and I got my home back,” Elaine said. By the early 1980s it was becoming clear that the community needed a single valley-wide water entity. “The two boards had been operating together as a ten-man board for nearly 20 years,” said Glen Hardy who served on the Logandale board at that time. “We thought it was time that the two boards ought to be brought together to service the whole valley.” On July 22, 1983, the enacting legislation which formed the Moapa Valley Water District under the Nevada Revised Statutes was passed. The story of water in the Moapa Valley will continue in next week’s edition of the Progress. Historical information was gathered for this article from “Moapa Valley Domestic Water Supply” an article written by Grant M. Bowler and from an old “Desert Echoes” article written by Effie S. Davenport. |
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