Winds whip valley, Lake Mead

Rescue teams searching through this morning found no capsized houseboat, but did find a motorboat tied to a houseboat that had taken on water and capsized from the strong winds that reached gusts of 70 mph on Lake Mead.

The strong winds kept the National Park Service and Nevada Division of Wildlife busy Tuesday night pulling off at least a half-dozen other water craft onto rocky shores.

"We flew the area this morning after checking the shorelines last night and did not find any houseboat overturned," Karen Whitney, a spokeswoman for Lake Mead National Park, said. "We did locate a party whose rental boat (attached to a houseboat) had overturned. That appeared to be the one in question."

Whitney said the park service dispatcher received a call from the Metro Police dispatcher Tuesday afternoon after receiving a call from a boater reporting a capsized boat.

"The caller said the houseboat had overturned and there were people in the water -- then the phone went dead," Whitney said. "They weren't able to give a location or say how many people had been on the houseboat."

Pilots sent out to search the area this morning reported no one in distress, Whitney said, but did find a houseboat with a swamped motorboat tied off to it.

"We located them and will contact them by boat," Whitney said. "It appears that perhaps we made it through the night fine."

The strong winds played havoc around the entire Las Vegas Valley, knocking down power lines and interrupting telephone and cable television service at scattered locations.

A National Weather Service spokesman reported the strongest wind at McCarran International Airport was 54 miles per hour. Whitney said she heard reports from some sources that wind in some spots around the lake were at least 70 miles per hour.

"A number of boaters called and said they were taking on water or had been forced onto rocks," Whitney said. "But everyone is OK. Some will have to be towed off the rocks."

Whitney said there were 67 houseboats on the lake at the time of the high wind, but only one made a distress call.

She said the National Weather Service issued wind warnings at 5:38 p.m. and 6:29 p.m.

She said there was a report of six-foot swells through the narrows at Boulder Canyon near Virgin Basin.

"Winds varied throughout the lake," said Whitney. "It's such a large area, it hits at different times and comes from different directions."

Other damage reported include a dislodged gas dock at Temple Marina and a shifted dock at the Lake Mead Marina, she said.

By midnight the winds on the lake and across the valley had eased, but about 2,500 Las Vegas area residents were still without power.

Nevada Power spokesman Tom Henley said a handful of power poles were knocked down by the wind, creating some of the outages, but the major source of problems was trees and limbs hitting the lines.

Henley said when a tree hits a line the power automatically shuts off, but it may come back on if the tree dislodges itself. If not, the power stays off until it can be manually turned back on.

The outages may have been more widespread had it not been for a precautionary program Nevada Power instituted several years ago.

"Under our circuit reliability program, we beefed up the circuits that received strong winds," Henley said. "The majority of the circuits can withstand winds from 30 to 50 miles per hour."

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