LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — A sunken speedboat at Lake Mead has fascinated people for the past 15 months, a conversation piece for the 23-year megadrought.
Now, someone has decided to use it as a canvas for a political statement. Graffiti found on the boat over the weekend was directed at the governor. “Yo Lombardo vote yes for rent control,” the message said.
A post on Wednesday afternoon showed the message covered under a coat of white paint. “The Tomb of the Unknown Boater has been repaired,” a caption said.
For boaters and other visitors, it has become a familiar sight in the Government Wash area of Lake Mead National Recreation Area.
“All of us that frequent the lake see it as a true landmark of the national park now. So we definitely hated that someone defaced it,” Brittney Beale said on Wednesday. She posted the first photo of the boat covered in graffiti after a visit to the lake on Sunday, Aug. 6, around 2 p.m.
Beale, who lives in Las Vegas, said it wasn’t like that on Saturday afternoon. She hopes it’s not a trend.
“I think we should leave things alone,” Beale said. But she did get a laugh out of one person’s suggestion on Facebook to paint the boat like a shark.
It’s a beacon, a landmark and a visual representation of the drought that gives the “bathtub ring” a run for its money. The boat is practically a gauge for the depth of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States.
Lake Mead continues to fill, inching up to 1,062.26 feet on Wednesday. When 8 News Now first reported on the vertical speedboat, the lake level was 1,049.53 feet. It would plunge 9 more feet by the end of July.
It’s possible that the boat will be completely submerged again by the time the Bureau of Reclamation fills Lake Mead to 1,065.59 feet — the goal in September.
Lake Mead was at its lowest point (since it was initially filled) a little more than a year ago. A wet winter produced record snowpack levels in the Upper Colorado River Basin, helping reservoirs all along the river recover to some degree. Lake Mead is still only about a third full.
The graph above shows how snowpack has helped, but officials say climate change has changed the Colorado River basin, and more water is allocated to states that depend on the river than the amount of water that actually exists.