The body found in a barrel at Lake Mead on Sunday may have been underwater for as long as four decades and more bodies are likely to appear as the lake recedes due to severe drought, Las Vegas Metro police homicide Lt. Ray Spencer said.
Police suspect the person was killed in the 1980s based on personal items in the barrel, Spencer said. He would not elaborate on the person’s cause of death or the items found, citing the ongoing investigation.
A photo shared with the I-Team showed what looked like skeletal remains in the barrel. The barrel looked to have been stuck in the mud.
Boaters discovered the body around 3 p.m. Sunday.
Protect your home and car with the best EMP, solar flares and lightning shield available…
“We heard a woman scream from the side of the beach and then my husband went over to obviously see what was wrong,” Shawna Hollister said. “And then he realized there was a body there in a barrel.”
Police believe the barrel was fully intact when it was dropped into the lake.
“It’s going to take an extensive amount of work,” Spencer said about identifying the victim, adding his team was reaching out to UNLV to examine growth on the barrel and when it may have started to erode.
“It’s going to be a very difficult case,” Spencer said. “I would say there is a very good chance as the water level drops that we are going to find additional human remains.”
Drink clean water at home… Get this filter now…
The area where the barrel was discovered is near the Hemenway Harbor boat ramp. Crews have had to extend the ramp hundreds of feet over the past decades to get it closer to the water.
In the 1980s, what is now beach would have been several dozen feet underwater.
The ongoing severe drought is leading to other discoveries in the lake. Last week, the top of a water intake pipe was visible above the water’s surface as the lake level continues to drop.
Lake Mead dropped below 1,056 feet in elevation last Tuesday, less than a week after hitting 1,057 feet the week before. Lake levels are expressed in altitude, not depth. At its highest levels, the lake is near 1,225 feet.
Health Ranger Store: Buy Clean Food and Products to heal the world…
“I think anybody can understand there are probably more bodies that have been dumped in Lake Mead, it’s just a matter of, are we able to recover those?” Spencer said.
“It’s heartbreaking to see that somebody’s loved one is out there so I mean I hope they get justice or somebody finds out at least who it is,” Hollister said.
The Clark County coroner’s office was working to identify the remains.
Colorado River Reservoirs Are So Low, Government Is Delaying Releases
With long-term severe drought continuing to take a toll on the Colorado River, the federal government is expected to announce on Monday that it will retain some water in one of the river’s major reservoirs to temporarily stave off what it called increased uncertainty in water and electricity supplies.
The anticipated decision to keep more water in Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border, rather than releasing it downstream to the other major reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas, comes as both are at record-low levels after 20 years of drought. Powell, behind Glen Canyon Dam, currently holds less than one-fourth of the amount it held when it filled after the dam was built in the 1960s.
In a letter last month to officials of the seven states that receive water from the river, an assistant Interior Department secretary, Tanya Trujillo, said there were concerns that Powell could decline further over the next 24 months to a “critically-low” level at which the dam could no longer generate hydropower. That would create a number of problems for the water and electricity supply and for the dam itself, she wrote.
In a joint letter two weeks later, the state officials agreed to the proposal to keep more water in the lake “to reduce the risks we all face.”
The decision would keep nearly half a million acre-feet of water in Lake Powell. That is about 8 percent of the lake’s current volume, and is equivalent to the annual amount used by a million or more households. Under a separate plan agreed to last month, the bureau will also release a half million additional acre-feet into Powell from an upstream reservoir, Flaming Gorge, at the Utah-Wyoming border.
Prepare your retirement by investing in GOLD, SILVER and other PRECIOUS METALS…
Without the additional water, the bureau had estimated there was about a one in four chance that by 2024 the lake level would fall below 3,490 feet above sea level, at which point power could no longer be produced.
Conservationists and water policy experts said the expected decision was only a short-term fix, and that work must be done quickly on ways to make the river, which supplies water to 40 million people, as well as for agricultural and industrial use, sustainable over the long term.
Bart Miller, a program director with Western Resource Advocates, an environmental advocacy group, said his organization supported the bureau’s decision. “But it’s not enough to fix the problem,” he said. “Throughout the Colorado River basin we are using more water than the river provides.”
Haley Paul, policy director at Audubon Arizona, said that the region needed to figure out how to share a river made smaller by climate change. “I don’t think we’re there and we urgently need to get there,” she said.
Lake Mead is currently at 31 percent of capacity, and because it gets almost all its water from releases from Powell, the pending decision will cause it to fall even lower.
The status of Lake Mead led the Bureau of Reclamation, the Interior agency responsible for the supply of water and electricity from the Colorado, to declare a first-ever water shortage there last August. That triggered cuts in the supply from the lake, mostly to Arizona.
You will ALWAYS have electricity with this portable power station…
The bureau is evaluating the situation and could decide this summer that Lake Mead has declined to a point where even more cuts are necessary. But in response to a request from the officials in the seven states, the bureau is expected to say that it won’t take into account the water held back from Mead in making its decision.
The reservoirs, the two largest in the United States, have been declining for years, amid a megadrought that began in 2000 and that has continued and been made worse by global warming. This period is now the driest two decades in 1,200 years.
The Colorado gets most of its water from melting snowpack, and the situation has worsened over the past two years as soils have become so dry that much of the runoff was absorbed before reaching the river. This year, runoff in the upper Colorado basin, which reaches Lake Powell, is projected to be only about two-thirds of average.
The level of Lake Powell is currently at an elevation of 3,523 feet, 177 feet below capacity. The intakes that allow water through the dam to generate hydropower are at 3,490 feet.
Hydropower is useful in maintaining the stability of electrical grids in part because the amount of electricity generated can quickly be changed to help the grid match demand. In her letter, Ms. Trujillo said that if Powell reached 3,490 feet, “the western electrical grid would experience uncertain risk and instability.”
In addition, she wrote, water supplies to Western and Southwestern states “would be subject to increased operational uncertainty.” Water supplies to Page, Ariz., near the dam, and a nearby Native tribe, would especially be at risk, she wrote, because their intake is at about the same elevation as the hydropower intakes.
The dam itself would face “unprecedented reliability challenges,” Ms. Trujillo wrote, because with the hydropower intakes above the water level, the lake water would have to be routed through the dam using lower tunnels that were not designed for continuous use. “We are approaching operating conditions for which we have only very limited actual operating experience — and which occurred nearly 60 years ago,” she wrote.
Brad Udall, a senior climate scientist at Colorado State University, said the concerns in the letter about the reliability of the power grid and of the dam had not really been raised in all the drought contingency planning over the past few decades.
“We’ve expended a lot of effort in producing plans” for what happens when the reservoirs fall to critical levels, Mr. Udall said. “And what we’re finding out, unfortunately, is that these plans are turning out to be completely inadequate. All of a sudden these new issues arise and haven’t having previously been considered and are really important.”
StrangeSounds.org is now running ad-free CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MY WORK…
Here some things to add to your disaster & preparedness kit:
- Protect your home and car with the best EMP, solar flares and lightning shield available…
- Drink clean water at home… Get this filter now…
- Health Ranger Store: Buy Clean Food and Products to heal the world…
- Prepare your retirement by investing in GOLD, SILVER and other PRECIOUS METALS…
- You will ALWAYS have electricity with this portable SOLAR power station…
- Qfiles is another great site for alternative news and information…
Who the hell designed this?
Not one sane rational engineer had a brain cell left.
It’s a desert you stupid dipsh##s.The water needs to flow from both top and bottom to accommodate conditions.Not just a bottom drain emergency pipe.
How stupid do you have to be.
I grew up watching the A-Team; now there’s an I-Team? When will it end?
What else is new? Colorado lakes are all graveyards, anyway. thousands of American Indians are buried near ancient towns and cities, all wiped out by greed. Local mafia like them for that, but I bet they never thought to see their victims, again. No more than east coast mafia would abandoned coal mines.