Editorial: Let’s learn a lesson from flood

Wednesday, July 28, 1999 | 9:38 a.m.

Residents who suffered damage to their homes, businesses and vehicles because of the July 8 flood in the Las Vegas Valley undoubtedly blamed Mother Nature for all the havoc. The truth is we earthlings were as much at fault.

The flood was actually Mother Nature's way of paying us back for years of rapid population growth where common sense urban planning has taken a back seat to haphazard zoning decisions. Locally elected officials rarely meet a zoning variance they do not like.

As Sun reporter Mary Manning has written repeatedly, we are paying dearly for turning the valley into a gigantic paved parking lot. It does not take an advanced engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to recognize that water travels downhill a lot faster when it hits nothing but concrete.

It is somewhat puzzling that we can build glorious megaresorts with high-tech amenities but not know how to save the Charleston Boulevard underpass from drowning every time the skies open up.

Homeowners and businessmen must also look in the mirror. We are talking about those who are situated in flood plains but who do not have the foresight to carry flood insurance. They can share their foolishness with the folks who live in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, the ones who do not carry earthquake insurance.

Not to worry. We now have the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help bail us out. Why spend local revenues on flood abatement systems when we can turn to federal taxpayers?

We have spent about $300 million in sales tax revenues since 1989 on flood abatement projects, including detention basins designed to collect excess water and slow it down before it eventually drains into Lake Mead. But we obviously need to do more.

The time is long overdue for the Regional Flood Control District board and other local authorities to reconsider previously rejected recommendations that could reduce flooding and also protect the desert's fragile environment. One such idea comes from Norma Cox, a local environmental activist.

She believes the county would be wise to build retention basins that could capture floodwaters and reuse them for irrigation and to recharge ground water. Critics have said such basins would cost too much money and that there is not enough land to make them possible.

Funny, but this valley is dotted with patches of vacant land, a testament to the same haphazard zoning and development those critics helped make possible. As for cost, how does $20.5 million in flood damage to public structures sound?