Friday, May 27, 2005 | 11:12 a.m.
Part-time librarian Claudia "Tookie" Reed said Tuesday afternoon that nature is full of surprises, and after 22 years living in the Mount Charleston area, melting snow is the latest.
The library sits at the western end of Old Town, the elementary school is at the east end. Officials and volunteers worry that the sudden switch to hot weather coming earlier than normal coupled with rapidly melting mountain snows could wash out the bridge leading to the library or swamp the school.
Reed watched waters rising in a normally dry stream bed Tuesday while a separate stream of clear spring water bubbled out of a mountainside behind the library.
"You're fighting fires. You're fighting avalanches. You've fighting the water. You're fighting everything constantly up here," Reed said.
Although Reed has seen the dry creeks flow with spring runoff a couple times in her two decades there, she said she has never seen the water flow as high as this year's streams. After heavy snowfall in the Spring Mountains, Reed said she expected running water.
Before driving to Las Vegas Monday night, Reed said she heard a TV announcer say, "Chaos on Mount Charleston."
"Chaos, indeed. I checked Old Town and all the lights were off. Things were real quiet," Reed said. "I could still hear the stream flowing."
One of two entrances leading to the Rainbow subdivision was closed by a downed tree across the road.
Rainbow resident and university system regent Thalia Dondero said she visited her cabin Wednesday morning. There was no street flooding, but a river of water poured down a dry creek that normally has a trickle most years.
"A couple of weeks ago I was there and there was a pile of snow in the yard," Dondero said. The snow was gone on Tuesday. Tulips and lilac bushes are blooming at Dondero's cabin as well as at others in the Spring Mountain.
The rapid melting of heavy snows on Mount Charleston has saturated the ground, which acts like a sponge under rain or snowfall, said Bronson Mack, a spokesman for the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
"The ground can only absorb so much," Mack said, then the water runs on the surface in springs, in seeps and in places where people have never seen water.
The water will continue traveling downhill, recharging underground basins in the Las Vegas Valley, Mack said.
The heavy runoff occurred after a "big time," above-average snowfall in the Spring Mountains, National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Fuis said. Kyle Canyon's fire house had 31 inches of snow on the ground on Jan. 31, he said. An average year might bring roughly a foot of snow there.
A major threat of flooding remains from an avalanche in Echo Canyon Jan. 11, where snow up to a depth of 75 feet is perched ready to add its snowmelt to the rapid runoff, Fuis said.
Conditions for the avalanche formed after 22 inches of dry snow had accumulated, followed by rain and then wet snow and warmer temperatures three days before the avalanche on Jan. 11.
In Old Town volunteers manned a line stretching from a pickup truck filled with some of the 3,000 sandbags donated by Clark County Emergency Management to divert rushing water cutting across a road. Water also ran down behind the library by mid-afternoon.
"They've got it under control," resident Brian Cicotti said. "It's a shame all this water is being wasted."
For 12-year Old Town resident Lamont Turner, the sandbags protected a fire hydrant and two pipes that he had placed in a creek bed that he had dredged on his property. The pipes, 4 feet wide, and 5 feet wide, channeled runoff away from his home.
"The third day the runoff was headed for the school and I ran in front of it," Turner said. After notifying the teachers and students, the retired Nevada Department of Wildlife employee headed home.
"As luck would have it, it ran away toward the right side of the road, away from the school," Turner said.
Turner isn't surprised at the new springs appearing all over the mountain range. "There's so much pressure, springs are likely to come up anywhere," he said.
Wayne Daily, fire management officer for the Nevada Division of Forestry, led a team of volunteers who kept nudging the runoff away from Turner's house.
"This particular spot in the channel seems to change hourly," Daily said. "I would say there is no immediate threat to the school," Daily said, after plopping another layer of sandbags in front of a fire hydrant.
"Who knows what Mother Nature's going to throw at us?"
Daily and others said it could be up to three weeks before the streams stop flowing so high. The flows depend on how warm the temperatures get in the mountains and how fast the snow melts.
Alan Bernhard, a 15-year Old Town resident whose house sits across the street from Turner's, shook his head at the rushing brown waters.
"I had a rock wall up there until yesterday," Bernhard said, sweeping a hand downstream to show where the rocks had tumbled.
After sunset Daily and his crew discovered a piece of rebar blocking the four pipelines under the Old Town bridge. The metal rod captured huge rocks and whole shrubs washing down the channel in the runoff.
After a half hour of chopping weeds, rolling stones and removing the rebar, the water level under the bridge dropped noticeably.
Ron and Liz Claggett live in one of the first houses built in Old Town.
Ron Claggett was working to upgrade the house Tuesday afternoon, not worrying about rising runoff.
"I sleep every night with the windows open, listening to the stream," Claggett said.
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