Staying in good spirits

Phil Hagen

Tuesday, Aug. 12, 1997 | 10:02 a.m.

BOULDER CITY -- Behind Sunday's dark clouds, residents here managed to find a silver lining.

"Nobody's homeless, nobody was killed and nobody was injured," said Police Chief David Mullin, whose department's main pain was answering phone calls regarding the citywide power outage. "We got off pretty lucky."

But after the storm lashed the city with hurricane-strength gusts and splashed it with up to 3 inches of rain, causing more than $1 million in damage to public property alone, it was certainly more than just another manic Monday.

Especially for people such as Dena Weinberg, whose dry-cleaning business on Nevada Highway didn't exactly live up to its description when she first surveyed the wet and wild scene.

"It's a war zone," she said about eight hours into her day, with about four more hours of cleanup to go.

Though the city and many businesses like Weinberg's were in a state of emergency, she was in good spirits.

"That's the only way to be," she said. "I have my front counter out in my parking lot and I'm doing business as we speak. I'm the only cleaners in Boulder City and I'm not going to let these people down."

Besides a drive-up dry-cleaners, other post-storm sights included:

* Broken, downed and uprooted trees everywhere. About 40 were toppled at the Boulder City Golf Course, which had to be closed Monday. Also impressive was an old elm at Wilbur Square that had snapped in half.

"Judging from the size of some of those trees, it would have taken microburst winds," said Kim Runk, a science officer with the National Weather Service in Las Vegas who was here Monday to investigate the storm. He estimated that those bursts reached speeds of 80 mph. "You're talking hurricane-strength," he said.

* Mud, mud and more mud. City workers are working overtime to shovel and sweep up the earth that was carried onto city streets by runaway water. Many residents were doing the same just to get into their driveways.

One of the hardest-hit areas was Buchanan Avenue. The cost to clean up the debris, fix the road and replace the new curbs and gutters will be about $250,000, said Public Works Director Alan Gove.

Down past the end of that road, the city's new Wetlands Park has become more like a swamp. "It's pretty much wiped out," said Colleen Dwyer, public affairs specialist for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which helped fund the project. Too bad, since the complex water purification system was "well on its way to being well-established."

The other side of town, the Hemenway Valley, was what Runk called the "bull's-eye" of the whole storm, as it received more rain in a few hours than Boulder City usually gets all year. Two roads that run through the valley down to U.S. 93 were closed by flash-flood damage. One of the roads was undercut by the current, dropping asphalt and earth about 15 feet down its side.

At Hemenway Park, the rolling waters spread a sea of rocks through the gazebos and grassy areas where bighorn sheep like to graze. At the softball fields, a mud slide crashed through the right-field fence, slid all the way past third and took out part of the home-team dugout.

* Structural damage. The City Center office complex downtown was under construction until some weather-aided destruction. Several homes were flooded, some severe enough to force their belongings out to the front yard. Power poles and a few of the city's old-fashioned street lights were knocked over. And some Gingerwood Mobile Park residents have new addresses after a wall of water burst through and did a little rearranging.

Considering that the storm "greatly exceeded" the expected 100-year-flood, Gove was pleased with how the city held up. Even the Hemenway drainage system "worked quite well," despite losing the lower quarter of its multiuse path to erosion. The cost of repairing the channel, most of which runs along U.S. 93, will be about $600,000, Gove said.

The whole cleanup, he said, will take several months and more than $1 million.

City Manager John Sullard, whose workers are still assessing the damage, has implemented a disaster emergency plan, and along with the city of Henderson, is petitioning the state for relief.

The last time a state of emergency was declared was in 1984, after a storm that Boulder City historian Dennis McBride said rivaled Sunday's.

"There was severe flooding, but the building damage was much worse after this storm," he said.

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