County aims to stem tide of Duck Creek

By the time Carole Rocca picked up her 96-year-old mother from day care in Henderson on Friday, roaring muddy floodwaters had covered Boulder Highway and Stephanie Avenue.

Rocca and her mother, Vinnie Vincent, faced flooding that has become all too common for hundreds of homeowners living along Duck Creek, which runs across the southern end of the valley.

To return to their home in the 300-unit Duck Creek Condominium complex south of Russell Road and west of the highway, Rocca and Vincent had to risk crossing the flooded street.

"I roared through that thing, put my foot to the floorboard," Rocca said.

For Rocca and her mother, this summer has been a constant dodge of muddy waters overflowing Duck Creek as it crosses the Las Vegas Valley from the southwest to the Las Vegas Wash on the east.

"I was the last car through on Friday," she said. But to return home or to take her mother to a doctor's appointment requires scheduling seemingly as tight as that for the launch of a space shuttle.

"I always fear we won't make it back," Rocca said. "The complex becomes an island."

Residents of Stadium Mobile Home Park at the east end of Russell Road floated on rushing water during that same storm, one of a series that has drenched Southern Nevada this summer.

Firefighters had to rescue a young mother and her three children as floodwaters rose more than two feet inside their mobile home inside the park.

Damages to the homes and park could top $500,000, said Franz Fischer, president of Reelsearch Corp., the management company for the park.

"The only thing good about Friday is nobody got killed," Fischer said.

Every time it rains, the park's problems become worse, Fischer said. The 1,000 residents include 200 children. An 18-inch drinking-water line broke first, then a sewer line poured up to 1,200 gallons per minute of raw sewage into the creek, he said.

A 28-inch, high-pressure natural gas line has been exposed for almost 300 feet, creating fear of an explosion among park residents.

The broken sewer line poses a special problem for the Clark County Sanitation District, spokesman Marty Flynn said. "There's too much flooding in the area," he said. "There is a serious issue there, and it needs to be addressed."

Flynn did not know when the broken line would be fixed. "We're going to look for a long-term solution," he said. That might mean moving the line out of Duck Creek.

Sanitation district crews discovered the leak Tuesday morning. But a telephone pole leaning into the creek is threatening another 15-inch pressurized sewer line, Flynn said.

To deal with the problem of the broken main, the sanitation district is pumping raw sewage from the broken line to another manhole. It also has dammed the creek to keep contaminated water from the sewer and a separate broken drinking-water line from going downstream and entering the Las Vegas Wash. The wash leads to intake lines for Southern Nevada's drinking-water supply six miles downstream.

For hundreds of residents living along Duck Creek, the solution to such flash floods will come sooner rather than later. The Clark County Regional Flood Control District plans to begin building more projects with a $150 million bond.

The money will be available in mid-October, Regional Flood Control District Director Gale Fraser said Wednesday.

The plan calls for an $11 million detention basin east of Las Vegas Boulevard South to trap Duck Creek's waters upstream, Fraser said. "It won't solve all the problems, but it will help," he said.

While growth has contributed to the flooding problem, so have the year's unusually heavy rains, Fraser said. "Since this flood-control district came into existence in 1989, this is the most water we've had," he said. Precipitation levels have been embellished by the warm-water Pacific Ocean phenomenon called El Nino.

Duck Creek drains 250 square miles of the southwest valley. "There's a lot of space to drain the water," Fraser said.

The Regional Flood Control District Board, realizing the valley is relatively unprotected when rain falls in urban areas, decided in May to accelerate flood-control projects.

While giant detention basins built at the western edges of the valley will capture deluges falling in the Spring Mountains, if the rain falls where homes and businesses have developed, the damage is swift and frightening, as Rocca and her mother discovered.

The RFCD will try to speed flood protection in the valley with the October bond issue, Fraser said. At the pace of a normal approach in collecting and spending a quarter-cent sales tax approved by voters in 1987, the valley would remain vulnerable to flooding for up to 30 years, he said. That is why flood-control work has accelerated.

As Southern Nevada continues to grow, however, the flood-control district faces the same problem as every other public service: Keeping up with the people moving here.

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