Thursday, July 8, 1999 | 7:57 a.m.
Flood waters swallowed hundreds of cars, trapped drivers and smashed mobile homes as torrential rains slammed into the city Thursday in an onslaught that killed at least two people.
"It's a nightmare. It's one of the worst things I've ever seen," said Nevada Highway Patrol spokesman Scott Flabi.
Firefighters rescued stranded motorists whose cars were sucked into the water.
Water turned sections of busy Interstate 15 into a lake and brought traffic to a standstill. Most major intersections were underwater and block walls along the Las Vegas Wash collapsed.
Mobile home residents watched as their homes in a park on Boulder Highway, in the southeast part of the city, were swept away or undermined.
"This is as serious as it gets," said Clark County Fire Department spokesman Steve La-Sky. "Our emergency dispatch switchboard is lit up."
He said hundreds of cars were trapped in high waters and at least three mobile homes had been lost. He didn't know the extent of damage to the others.
"It was picking up cars and throwing them around like toothpicks," said Robert Anderson, who watched as his neighbor's mobile home washed away down the Flamingo Wash. "It was a huge double-wide (trailer) and it just went into the water and it just disintegrated."
Tourists sought shelter in the casinos along the famed Strip.
"The Strip is a lake, up over the curbs, into our fountains," said Phil Cooper, spokesman for Caesars Palace hotel-casino.
"This is the worst flood in Las Vegas since at least 1984," said Ron McQueen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
The body of a homeless man was recovered from a wash area while a woman died in a traffic crash caused by high waters.
The rain started about 11:30 a.m. By early afternoon, as many as 3 inches had fallen in parts of the city, McQueen said. The Las Vegas area usually receives only 4.1 inches in a year.
Caesars was forced to close part of its casino and the Forum Shops because of flooding, Cooper said.
"Looking out the window, it looked like a beautiful woman who had been crying, and all the makeup was running down her face. That's Las Vegas today," said Gilles Bloch, a tourist from France who watched the flooding from his hotel room at the Sahara hotel-casino.
"I should have brought some of my umbrellas from home," said tourist Cheryl Schley of Seattle. "I could have sold them."
Flights at McCarran International Airport were shut down for 45 minutes, airport spokeswoman Cynthia Markson said. Two planes were diverted to Los Angeles, she said.
Firefighters were trying to contain mudslides and boulder slides along the Summerlin Parkway northwest of the city, Flabi said.
The rains caused a ceiling to cave in at a Lucky's grocery store on the city's southwest side.
Gov. Kenny Guinn and city and county officials took a helicopter tour of the flood areas to assess damage and determine how much aid will be needed. Guinn said he thought the flooding would have been more contained.
"It's a wide strip of devastation," he said.
McQueen said the flooding was caused by a rich moisture flow out of northern Mexico and the Gulf of California.
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