A temporary water treatment facility in Las Vegas aims to keep pollution from flowing into Lake Mead and the Colorado River.
Las Vegas is not immune to the pop-up trend but the latest temporary installment in Sin City is neither a retail shop nor a restaurant – it’s a water treatment plant. With the recent completion of the temporary water treatment facility, environmental regulators and water officials hope to keep pollution from an industrial site in Henderson, Nev. from making its way into Lake Mead and the Colorado River, according to an article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
According to the Review-Journal, the temporary plant is expected to remove up to three tons of the hazardous chemical perchlorate from contaminated groundwater over the next 18 months. The plant, which reportedly cost between $18 million and $25 million to construct, was paid for out of a $1.1 billion settlement paid for by the owners of the contaminated site. The U.S. Department of Justice secured the settlement, which it says is the largest recovery in history for environmental cleanup, according to the article. The chemical was reportedly found in Lake Mead in the late 1990s and traced back to the old Kerr-McGee chemical plant where investigators found the country’s largest plume of perchlorate.
