After Lake Mead’s Years-Long Drought, Plummeting Water Levels Have Exposed A Grim Reality

Conditions have been drastically deteriorating at Lake Mead for a while now. At its fullest, the reservoir can hold an immense quantity of water — more than 9 trillion gallons. But this level hasn’t been reached in a long, long time. The reservoir hasn’t seen that much water since way back at the end of the 1990s.

Since that point in time, Lake Mead’s water levels have been dwindling more and more. At first, the decline was steady; the changes weren’t too dramatic. But over the past ten years or so, the situation’s become far more dire. Now the lake finds itself on the brink of total disaster.

And if things weren’t bad enough already, they got an awful lot worse at the beginning of May 2022. That was when the reduced lake started to reveal its terrible secrets. Back during the days when the reservoir had been at its fullest, the waters did a great job of covering whatever happened to be at the bottom. But times have now changed.

It was May 1, 2022, when the nightmare of Lake Mead really started to announce itself. This latest bout of drought had acutely lowered the water levels of the reservoir, which exposed something awful. A grotesque, appalling thing had come to the surface — and this was just the beginning. Much more was soon to follow.

Lake Mead’s pretty close to the Las Vegas Strip, which is less than 30 miles away. The lake’s also linked to the Colorado River, and its waters are extremely important for lots of people. They’re used all over the region, from Nevada to California, Arizona, and even some places in Mexico. Many millions of people rely on the reservoir.

Lake Mead isn’t a natural formation, though, and its creation was fraught with controversy. For thousands of years, the area where the reservoir now sits was dry land — and it was inhabited by many different indigenous tribes. Archaeological findings have shown us that people have lived here for perhaps 10,000 years.

The tribes who inhabited the area lived off the land. They hunted animals, ate the area’s vegetation, and they even undertook agriculture. A cave that sits close to the lake has been explored by archaeologists, who found a bunch of large animal remains inside. These included horses, camels, bighorn sheep, and ground sloths. It seems people had used these creatures as food.

The various tribes who lived in this region had different ways of life. Some, as we’ve seen, resided in caves, while others constructed simple houses. They all developed their own technologies and ways of cultivating food as well. Some groups were known to grow produce such as squash, beans, cotton, and corn.

The indigenous history of the land around the Colorado River was interrupted when white settlers began moving into the area. These newcomers soon came to dominate, pushing the Native American communities out and installing their own infrastructure. Railways were laid down, and mines were established to extract precious metals from the ground.

The settlers in the area then started to think about making the most out of the inherent power of the Colorado River. If they constructed a dam, the river could, among other things, be exploited for the sake of irrigating the land. So, at the start of the 20th century, the Boulder Dam project was initiated. This would later come to be known as the Hoover Dam.

It was through installing this dam across the Colorado River that Lake Mead came into being. The new reservoir proved quite the draw, as people flocked to the area to enjoy the water and its shores. By 1964 the region was officially classified as the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, the earliest site in America to be given such a designation.

So Lake Mead’s become a central feature of the wider region surrounding the Colorado River, providing leisure and water for millions. But this has come at a massive cost — and that shouldn’t be forgotten. Indigenous cultures were driven from the area, not to mention all the native flora and fauna that no longer has a home.

Many settler communities were also displaced by the dam. Big floods resulted from the construction, capable of wiping out whole towns. The little settlement of St. Thomas was left underwater, with its residents forced from their homes. Even today, the watery ruins can be seen when water levels dip.

Lake Mead’s water is generally composed of rain and melted snow that makes its way into the Colorado River. But in recent years, the water levels have been receding year on year. From the end of the 1990s, the reservoir’s found itself more and more empty, save for one little rise during 2005.

The water levels of Lake Mead are at record-breaking lows nowadays. Yet some people seem to argue that this is normal. They say this is precisely how the reservoir was designed to work: a period of high water levels will be followed by one of low volumes. Then the cycle resets and begins again. That’s a neat explanation, perhaps — but another, far grimmer interpretation seems more realistic.

Many experts blame climate change, induced by human activity, for the low levels of water in Lake Mead. Droughts have resulted, plus rising urban populations have placed a previously unheard-of strain on the water supply extracted from the reservoir. All of this is leading to disaster for the people and ecosystems of the region.

At the middle point of 2022, experts had issued a stark warning: by the fall, the water levels of Lake Mead are expected to recede by 12 more feet. Within another year, this reduction should more than double. If the prediction comes true, the reservoir will be at roughly one-fifth of its potential capacity. That’s terrifyingly low — and the consequences will be dire.

But another big worry is that these forecasts, already so grim, will actually prove to be underestimates. That’s happened already, in fact, as this year’s levels ended up being even lower than had been predicted back in 2021. Basically, Lake Mead’s receding so dramatically that experts are struggling to keep up.

The dwindling water level of Lake Mead’s unequivocally a disaster, and the consequences look set to be as far-reaching as they will be dire. But, bizarrely, another unexpected outcome’s begun to materialize. As the water gets lower and lower, the things at the bottom of the lake have been brought to light — and they often aren’t pretty.

This grim chapter in the unfolding tale started on May 1, 2022. Someone was spending time along the edge of the diminishing lake, and they noticed an object poking out of the water. It was a barrel, exposed for the first time in a very long while. It was worn and broken, so the visitor could see inside. And it made for a horrific sight.

Within this barrel lay human remains, stuffed inside and condemned to a watery grave. Who did they belong to, and what had happened? Well, the police have their theory. The body was dressed in clothes that looked old, maybe from the 1970s or 1980s. It seems, then, that this individual was murdered all those decades ago — and their body was then disposed of underwater.

Ray Spencer, a homicide lieutenant from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, was soon speaking to the press about this discovery. He spoke about the lower water levels now seen at Lake Mead, which he feared would ultimately lead to further revelations of this nature. He told CNN, “It’s likely that we will find additional bodies that have been dumped in Lake Mead.”

Sure enough, Spencer’s grim prediction proved prescient. Within a week of the initial discovery in the barrel, a call was made to the National Park Service rangers. It was during the daytime on a Saturday, and the person on the other end was pleading for help. They’d spotted something and needed assistance right away.

The park rangers were soon on the case, traveling to the scene. They were greeted with a bleak sight: a bunch of human bones. How this person had died wasn’t yet clear. All they could do, for now, was to get out there and bring the remains back to land.

The call alerting the National Park Service to the situation had been placed by siblings Lynette and Lindsey Melvin. They’d been out on the water that day, floating on top of paddle boards. The two sisters had been taking a look at a sandbar when they’d spotted the gruesome remains.

The two ladies didn’t necessarily freak out when they first spotted the bones, though. They presumed the items had come from an animal of some sort, maybe a bighorn sheep. But then they saw something horrifying: a jaw with some teeth still showing. And right away, they knew that these were the remains of a person.

Lynette spoke to ABC News about the discovery, saying, “We just really hope that the family of that person finally gets answers and hope their soul is laid to rest peacefully.” But did the sisters have a theory as to what had happened? They did, actually, and it was pretty convincing.

Having been raised in Las Vegas, the sisters had heard plenty of stories about gangsters killing people and leaving the bodies in Lake Mead. And these don’t appear to be idle rumors, as an expert has confirmed the Mafia connection to the region. According to Geoff Schumacher, who works at the Las Vegas Mob Museum, “Certainly, Las Vegas has a history with the Mob, and there have been people who have gone missing in this area over the years that may have been the victims of mob violence.”

Schumacher says the Mob’s been known to get rid of bodies by stuffing them into barrels. There have certainly been some notable examples of this in other parts of America. Having said that, though, it’s never been known to happen in Nevada. He added, “I don’t recall a case where we had anything like this where we found a body in a barrel that popped up in Lake Mead.”

But it seems we now have evidence of this grim activity having occurred at the lake. And the fact the body was found wearing clothes from the 1970s or 1980s could be significant, as the Mob was very active in Las Vegas back then. Schumacher observed, “There was a lot of conflict, and I would not at all be surprised to find that was the victim of Mob violence.”

So, it seems the body found in the barrel had a connection to the Mob. But what of the other one? Well, it soon emerged that there may, indeed, have been a link to gangsters — but not in the way that might be expected. Basically, a guy named Todd Kolod heard about the discovery on the news. He studied the details and came to a grim conclusion: this body might have belonged to his dad.

Todd’s dad was called Daniel, and he’d fallen off a boat into Lake Mead more than 60 years ago. His remains were never found. It seems like this was a freak accident yet there’s an interesting detail in the story: Daniel’s father, Ruby Kolod, was a gangster. Now, none of the evidence indicates that Daniel was killed because of his dad’s Mob connections. But it’s food for thought.

Todd was only three when this terrible incident happened. His dad had gone fishing, which he had a real passion for, but things then went very wrong. He and his pal were knocked off the boat and slipped into the lake. While the other guy was saved, Daniel was never seen alive again.

Daniel’s father, the man with Mob connections, tried in vain to recover his son’s body. It never seemed likely it’d be found, but then, out of the blue, this body had been recovered. Maybe it really did belong to Todd’s dad, though that’ll have to be confirmed with a DNA test. Who knows what the result will be?

This was quite the unexpected twist for Todd, and it all happened because of the receding water levels of Lake Mead. The discoveries of these bodies, while grim, are making for interesting stories, though that isn’t all that’s being recovered from the reservoir. A lakebed, it seems, can be home to all sorts of things.

By the beginning of July, an entirely different kind of discovery at Lake Mead had been announced. A landing craft from the World War II period had shown up, having once been resting roughly 185 feet underwater. Now, much of it was sticking out and visible. Yet how’d it end up there?

This vehicle’s known as a Higgins landing craft. It was mass-produced during the last years of the war, built from 1942 to 1945. The model was designed to carry soldiers and would even have been utilized on D-Day. But what about this specific unit, though? Had it been to Europe?

The answer to that hasn’t been confirmed yet, alas. But while we don’t know if this specific craft was used during World War II, we do know it was dispatched to survey the Colorado River after the conflict had ended. Ownership was later transferred to a marina at Lake Mead before the vehicle eventually sank to the lakebed.

Now, the landing craft’s poking out of the surface again. It’s only a matter of time before other items start to reappear, too. Bodies, boats — who knows what else? As the water continues to dwindle at Lake Mead, more and more things are going to be recovered. And some of those discoveries are likely to be horrific.