Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Many Las Vegans left stranded

Safety tips

The Clark County Regional Flood Control District and the National Weather Service warn residents to use common sense when severe storms and flooding occur. Tips for staying safe include:

The Nevada Insurance Council today offered tips on how residents can cope after the flood:

Just about everyone who was in Las Vegas Tuesday night has a story about what happened to them or what they witnessed during the flood of Aug. 19, 2003.

Rose Eastman who lives on the corner of Gowan Road and Jones Boulevard had six inches of standing water in her house this morning.

She lives there with two sisters and at about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday she tried calling one of her sisters to warn her not to drive down Gowan but she could not reach her.

Her sister made it home, but after she parked her Ford Escort near the house, the floodwaters rose and the car began floating. Luckily it floated up onto their lawn.

But at about 9 p.m. Rose Eastman went outside and the car was gone. The water had previously receded, so it hadn't floated away. Someone apparently had stolen the car.

"It's inhumane. It's disgusting," Eastman said.

She stayed up all night in the garage "waiting for looters." This morning she had muddy carpets laid out in her driveway. She estimated her home suffered $40,000 in damage.

Eastman has lived in the house for 13 years, and said this was the worst she flooding she had ever endured. The July 1999 flood wasn't as bad at her home as Tuesday's, she said, but she was glad that after the 1999 flood she got flood insurance.

Four doors down from Eastman, Mary Beville and Kathy Raso were moving mud and muck away from the front of their house and shoveling landscape rocks back into their yard this morning.

Raso's white Saturn had been parked along the curb in front of their home Tuesday afternoon. When Gowan turned into a river Tuesday night, her first thoughts were to pray that the car wouldn't be swept away.

When it was, her prayers changed to "please, God, don't let it hit anybody," she said.

That's why she was grateful that after the flood waters carried her car about 20 feet down the street, the Saturn smacked into a light pole.

Beville said: "I've never seen anything like it. It was like a raging river."

Raso said about four feet of water rushing past her home.

They said firefighters had to rescue a man from his car in front of their house. The water was over the hood of the man's car, Beville said.

"You felt so helpless because all you could do was sit and watch," she said.

From Valley Road, Phil Williams, 38, stood in front of his parked motorbike and watched Gowan Road flow by Tuesday.

"If I could just get across the river and make a left, I could get home," he said. "But it's moving too swiftly. If I were to even attempt it, the bike would go out from under me and that would be all she wrote."

Williams couldn't call his family, because his cell phone wasn't working After over an hour of standing and waiting, he directed his frustration at the road itself.

"Gowan's a joke," he said. "There's no drainage on Gowan, and even if there was, it wouldn't help much. We could be here for days."

Marlo Watson, who lives nearby on Allen Road, was another of the 40 or so motorists who parked on Valley Road in front of "Gowan River," as some took to calling it.

Watson and her daughter, who was in tears at first, smiled at the odd sight of a small tree floating through the intersection.

"There goes somebody's landscaping," Marlo Watson observed.

Still stranded half an hour later, she said, "All the groceries have now melted in the car."

Alice McCain wasn't stranded, but she came out to the intersection to take in the scene.

"At the cul-de-sac, they were watching and telling me how deep it was, and it just didn't seem real," McCain said. "It's real."

When a woman driving a minivan pulled up to the intersection and stopped, pondering her next move, McCain shouted, "Roll up your windows and go!"

The driver responded, "Oh, yeah, right, you just want to see me on the news."

Asked what was the most interesting thing she saw carried down Gowan Road by the current, McCain said, "a football and a sippy-cup." Minutes later, when a flotilla of two-by-fours drifted by, she said, "Probably somebody's garage."

Kris Hannah had left the Burlington Coat Factory at Sahara Avenue and Jones Boulevard Tuesday afternoon with her two children and headed for home in northwest Las Vegas.

Ninety minutes later she found herself at Garehime Heights Park wondering if she would ever get home.

"I don't know what to do," Hannah said at the park on Campbell Road near Alexander Road. "We've tried every road we can think of and we just can't get home."

Hannah was trying to get to Craig Road east of U.S. 95, but rivers of water blocked her at every turn.

"My husband was talking to us over the cell phone, giving us suggestions of streets, but we always hit water," Hannah said. "Then we started having phone trouble, but I guess that's because everyone was probably on their cell right then."

Hannah and thousands of other people were stranded by flood waters that overwhelmed portions of the Las Vegas Valley late Tuesday afternoon.

But it wasn't just rain that fell.

Hail pounding their northwest Las Vegas home woke up Ryan Wamsley and his family from their afternoon nap.

"It just coming and coming and coming," said Wamsley, 30, who works nights as a floor supervisor at the MGM Grand. "The backyard looked like it was covered with snow. ... The amount of hail there, you could have shoveled it."

The flooding that accompanied the storm kept Wamsley and his wife from going to work Tuesday night.

"We can't get anywhere," he said, noting that many of the roads between their home and the Strip were flooded.

Wamsley said the storm was an impressive sight.

"It looked like a hurricane. There was an ash tree just swaying back and forth in the wind," he said. "In seven years here I've never seen anything like it."

A little after 6 p.m. the clouds moved southeast, and Wamsley took the opportunity to go to the nearby 7-Eleven at Cheyenne and Fort Apache.

"I got a newspaper, cigarettes and something to drink," he said. "If the power goes out I'll do the crossword."

A swift stream of brown water flowed past the downed metal post holding the Fort Apache and Alexander street signs.

A line of cars, sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks approached the intersection slowly, with only some drivers making a U-turn instead of following the vehicle in front of them through the half-wheel deep water.

Gwen Everett was taking pictures and her husband Tom was videotaping the game of chicken going on within a few yards of their home.

"On the news Mayor Goodman said this was one of the worst intersections so we had to see," Gwen Everett said.

Across the street, Arlene Bartlett pulled her small blue sedan to the side of the road and debated whether to risk the drive across Alexander.

"I live on the other side," Bartlett said. "I've spent two hours trying to get home. I left at about 10 minutes before 5 (p.m.) because my son called about the basement was flooding."

Bartlett, a 52-year-old escrow coordinator for a local builder, works in a nearby Summerlin office.

She saw downed trees along Lake Mead and heavy traffic on her way north from Summerlin.

Bartlett tried to go west of Lone Mountain, but found the road covered with mud and large rocks blocking her way.

East of the mountain, the fast water on Alexander blocked her way north.

"I've been to this intersection three times," Bartlett said about the crowded Fort Apache and Alexander intersection. "I guess I'm a chicken. ... But it's kind of scary. I don't want to wreck the underneath of my car."

Bartlett watched another woman turn her car away from the intersection.

"See, that lady's chicken too," she said before getting up the courage to drive though the water, which lapped up into her wheel wells.

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