Cats and dogs? Thursday’s rain hit Southern Nevada in pools

Ed Koch and Mary Manning

Friday, July 9, 1999 | 11:12 a.m.

How much rain fell on the Las Vegas Valley Thursday?

Enough to fill 1.4 million 20,000-gallon swimming pools, UNLV geoscience professor David Weide said.

That's enough to give every man, woman and child in the valley a filled swimming pool -- and still have about 100,000 swimming pools left over.

Another way to look at it is that enough rain fell on the 1,600-square-mile valley to fill the new Las Vegas municipal swimming pool on Bonanza Road 50,000 times -- and that's a 560,000-gallon pool.

Those figures are based on just an inch of rain falling on the valley -- and that would total about 28 billion gallons.

The official rainfall at the National Weather Service station at McCarran International Airport was 1.29 inches. At least 3 inches of rain fell unofficially on some parts of the valley.

Only about one-eighth of the amount of rain that fell on Las Vegas Thursday went into the Las Vegas Wash, according to Southern Nevada Water Authority Manager David Donnelly.

That is equivalent to 10,000 acre-feet. To put that into perspective, Southern Nevada received 300,000 acre-feet a year from the Colorado River.