No more rain seen in LV’s near future

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, Oct. 28, 2002 | 12:01 p.m.

A light rain greeted late-night gamblers and night shift workers across the Las Vegas Valley this weekend, bringing a welcome respite to an area recently declared a disaster area due to an ongoing drought.

The showers, which fell from about midnight to 7 a.m. Saturday and Sunday, brought a little over a quarter of an inch of rain, bringing the year's total to 1.25 inches -- or about a third of what's normal for the area. Last year, 3.77 inches fell over the valley.

The showers were typical of a winter storm in the desert, National Weather Service meteorologist Kim Runk said this morning, but it was different from other storms that have blown through the valley recently, bringing promise but little wetness.

"There was more widespread rain," Runk said. "Past storms were more showery, moving through more quickly."

Some areas got up to half an inch of rain over the two days, though the official rainfall recorded at McCarran International Airport was one-tenth of an inch Saturday and seventeen-one-hundredths on Sunday.

"We'd like to see 20 or 30 days like that through the rest of the year," Runk said, noting that the valley is 3 inches behind the typical annual rainfall of 4.49 inches. "Though it helps, we have a substantial amount to make up."

However, no additional rain is in the forecast for the next 10 days.

The rain was too light to prompt flooding, the National Weather Service said. Four traffic fatalities were reported over the weekend, but none of them was attributed to the rain.

As for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's designation of Nevada as a disaster area due to ongoing drought last Thursday, the weekend's water was too little to change things, according to the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

The designation includes federal aid for farmers and ranchers whose livelihood has been affected by the lack of rain.