The Daily Rundown - July 29th, 2026
🚧 The Hoover Dam is closed to visitors due to emergency repairs affecting road access. The cableway system, which is used to bring heavy loads from the upper canyon ridge down to the power plant, is in need of repair. It’s the original system that was used to transport buckets of concrete used to build the dam.
The Bureau of Reclamation has offered no specific timeline for reopening. This cableway issue comes as the agency was already forecasting challenges in power plant operation due to historically low water levels.
💧 As federal officials negotiate new rules for sharing the Colorado River’s shrinking water supply, scientists are expanding efforts to better measure one of the basin’s biggest sources of water loss: evaporation.
The Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada, is installing floating weather stations directly on major Upper Colorado River reservoirs to collect more accurate measurements of the conditions that drive evaporation.
Researchers say improving evaporation estimates could give water managers better information as they make difficult decisions about the future of the Colorado River, where years of drought, warming temperatures and heavy demand have strained water supplies.
The project is a partnership between DRI, the Upper Colorado River Commission and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. This summer, researchers are establishing new monitoring stations at Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and Navajo reservoirs.
The effort builds on a monitoring project at Lake Powell that has collected evaporation data since 2019, making it one of the longest-running reservoir evaporation studies in the Western U.S.
Read the full story by the Mountain West News Bureau’s Kaleb Roedel here.
🚰 Death Valley National Park, 130 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is undertaking an effort to modernize two water and wastewater systems, according to reporting by KNPR’s Rafaela Gandolfo Bustamante.
The redevelopment comes through an $82 million investment funded by the Great American Outdoors Act. It will provide safe drinking water and reliable wastewater treatment for the park. Death Valley is considered the hottest and driest national park, which makes the need for reliable water systems a critical function.
Some of the park’s utility systems date back to the 1960s and are currently serving past their expected lifetimes. Enduring extreme desert conditions and flash floods accelerates pipeline deterioration, according to the National Park Service.
In 2024 alone, NPS staff repaired the water systems 43 times. The three-year project will break ground this fall and may temporarily spark the possibility of water outages or reduced parking. Death Valley saw 1.32 million visitors in 2025, per the National Park Service.
⛽ Prices at the pump continue to climb along with the temperature. The price for a gallon of regular gasoline in Las Vegas is around $4.80.That’s almost 20 cents more than a week ago and more than a dollar more than a year ago.
AAA says drivers should take precautions when traveling during intense heat, like checking for loose hoses and wear and tear on tires, as well as monitoring fluid levels. The U.S. Department of Energy suggests lowering the windows in the car when driving at lower speeds and using the air conditioning when driving at highway speeds to help maximize your vehicle’s efficiency.
The national price per regular gallon of gasoline has risen about 8 cents since last week to about $4.10. An excessive heat warning has been issued for the region beginning July 30 and lasting through August 2 for south-central and Southern Nevada.
🏀 The NBA Summer League series recently concluded at UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center, but Las Vegas remains in the men’s professional basketball conversation. Two expansion teams are likely coming to the NBA, and one of them is widely expected to call the Strip home. That prospect has spurred multiple ownership groups to bid on said team, according to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, as well as pitch a number of proposals involving venues both new and old.
If the NBA chooses Las Vegas, it will have a team from all four of the major men’s professional sports leagues — a feat the city would likely accomplish within only a decade’s time. Alan Snel, publisher and owner of LVSportsBiz.com, believes the race to own the team will come down to two parties. One of them is Vegas Golden Knights owner Bill Foley, who helped build much of the city’s professional sports infrastructure.
The other is a group headed by someone less familiar to Las Vegas: Jerry Colangelo. Should either one of them — or even one of the other groups vying for ownership that Silver didn’t reveal during Summer League — win the bid for a prospective Las Vegas team, they can expect to pay somewhere in the $8 billion to $11 billion range, Snel said.
Hear the full conversation with KNPR's Mike Prevatt here.
Part of these stories are taken from KNPR's daily newscast segment. To hear more daily updates like these, tune in to 88.9 KNPR FM.
