Miracle Mile flooding may have been averted

Friday, Aug. 6, 1999 | 11:57 a.m.

Confusion over who was to maintain the wash adjacent to the 520-unit Miracle Mile Mobile Home Park may have contributed to flooding that destroyed five homes and damaged another 10 last month, a Clark County official said Thursday.

County spokesman Doug Bradford said dedication of a portion of the Miracle Mile property in the Flamingo Wash to the county "most definitely" would have alleviated the erosion that destroyed the mobile homes in the park along Boulder Highway.

The confusion that apparently blocked the dedication of the property stemmed from a special-use permit that a would-be tenant of a warehouse next to the mobile home park sought in 1986 and 1987. According to planning department documents, the Clark County Planning Commission and planning department staff at that time requested dedication of the wash from the property owners.

The then-owners of the property for both the small warehouse and the mobile home park, Blasco Development Corp., did not attend hearings for the special-use permit. The tenants, according to department documents, relayed the request to Blasco, but confused "construction" with dedication.

The company at that time rejected the request because construction of flood-control systems in the wash would be prohibitively expensive for a private enterprise, said Ted Quirk, a Las Vegas attorney and one of the partners in Four Mile LLC, the present owner of the park, warehouse and wash. He said the owners, then or now, would have been happy to cede control of the wash to the county.

"Had anybody ever asked us to dedicate the wash, we would have in a heartbeat," Quirk said.

The Planning Commission granted the 1987 special-use request, with the caveat that the property owner would have to dedicate the wash in four years at the expiration of the original special-use permit. Although the special-use request was granted, the tenant -- a company that had requested a small office in the warehouse, which it would use to store slot machines -- never occupied the warehouse, Quirk said.

In 1991, the special-use request was never renewed, and at that point dedication of the wash "fell through the cracks," Bradford said.

The July 7 flooding killed two people, caused an estimated $20 million in damage, destroyed nearly 400 homes throughout the valley and prompted President Clinton to declare Clark County a federal disaster area.

Bradford said the county is taking steps in both the short and long term to alleviate future erosion at the site. He said the county will begin work within the next two weeks to shore up the eroded walls of the wash.