Arizona Pipeline history

By 1981, revenues had grown again, reaching $315 million on a customer base of 335,000.

In 1985, construction began on the New Waddell Dam just outside Phoenix.

In 1986, Southwest Gas dropped its "pure play" status when it paid $130 million for the stock of Nevada Savings and Loan Association, a Las Vegas-based thrift with $1.4 billion in assets.

In 1988, the banking operation's name was changed to PriMerit Bank (in part to distance itself from the developing savings and loan crisis), which then acquired Union Savings and Loan Association of Phoenix.

By 1991, Southwest Gas was sputtering.

The system brings water to approximately 1 million acres of land in the heart of Arizona and helped the state nearly double its population in the roughly 30 years since it was completed in 1993.

A warming trend in the Southwest had been leading to milder winters in the past two decades; the winter of 1995 was particularly mild, cutting deeply into the company's sales.

A project to expand the original Roosevelt Dam was completed in 1996, increasing its storage capacity by 20%. The new structure, Zuniga wrote, was a “single-curvature, uniform thickness mass concrete arch dam covering the original stone masonry of the dam.”

Southwest Gas also continued to add record numbers of new customers, including an estimated 66,000 in 1997.

The project has generated more than $2 trillion in economic value, providing “power generation, flood control, outdoor recreation, sediment control, and fish and wildlife conservation,” according to Jennifer E. Zuniga’s 2000 Bureau of Reclamation paper, The Central Arizona Project.