Guest column: Valley should find way to keep some of this rainwater

Saturday, Aug. 1, 1998 | 5:16 a.m.

I enjoyed Mary Manning's article, "Slow going for flood control" (July 26). I've lived in the Las Vegas Valley for more than 30 years. It flooded then, it floods now and it will flood again. Water flows downhill, as Mary aptly points out in her article. It's just a question of who gets flooded.

Caesars Palace hasn't flooded lately, at least not like it did in July 1975, when auto wreckers worked day and night salvaging drowned vehicles from the parking lot. There's no flooding now at the intersections of Harmon and Eastern, where a new health center stands on that flood channel. There's no flooding at Flamingo and McLeod either, where a brand new drugstore now stands. Flood control projects turned those parcels into valuable property.

The Charleston underpass still floods, as does Duck Creek near Boulder Highway and, of course, so does Las Vegas Wash. Storms two weeks ago turned the wash into a raging river, carrying tons of sediment-ladened floodwater, contaminated with fecal coliform bacteria, into Lake Mead. Government officials point out that bacterial contamination of floodwater is not surprising; it's happened many times before.

Since the early '90s, the flood control district has spent millions dredging washes in the Las Vegas Valley. The natural wetlands, which stabilize the banks and purify water in the washes, are almost all gone. They were dredged and hauled to landfills, or dumped on the banks in disgusting piles of decaying muck.

Beautiful cottonwood trees are cut down, leaving nothing but ugly stumps on the stream banks. "Flood control" totally devastated Flamingo Wash in the reach between Eastern and Pecos, near the Shepherd Eye Clinic. We get to pay for that mess with the quarter-cent sales tax passed in 1987.

There is nothing left but eroded washes in the valley. Now, when it rains, floodwaters race through them picking up contaminants and pushing even more sediments downstream.

Engineers crow that dredging is needed to keep the washes free of debris. Really? Many of these channels are 20-30 feet deep. If they're so worried about debris, why aren't they removing it more often from the underpasses that clog with mud and salt cedar, a nuisance plant that thrives in the dredged flood channels.

I question our whole approach to flood control. Most of the projects are designed to pass more floodwater into Lake Mead. Why? Aren't we close to running out of water in this valley? Why don't we design structures to trap, treat and use the floodwater?

Some of the old gravel pits in the lower valley would make good storage basins. Flood water could be used for irrigation, or other nonpotable uses, with very little treatment.

Several thousand acre feet of floodwaters have roared through Las Vegas Wash into Lake Mead during storms this year. Nevada doesn't get return flow credits for that floodwater. Once it hits Lake Mead, it's apportioned by the "Law of the River," and California gets the lion's share.

What a costly irony we have here. The water authority spends millions buying up water rights elsewhere in the Colorado River Basin. The flood control district spends millions giving away water from our own back yard. I hope someone out there can make sense of this situation. It sure baffles me.