By VERNON ROBISON
The Progress
A number of Moapa Valley businesses and residential properties were damaged in a flooding event that took place on Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, September 13-14.
The Overton Power District weather station in Overton reported 1.89 inches of rainfall beginning early Tuesday evening and extending off and on into the early morning hours of Wednesday.
The areas that received flooding were not usual. In fact, every time the lower Moapa Valley receives a rain event, these areas receive flooding. This time, with heavier rain, the flooding was more severe than usual.
Perhaps hardest hit was the Moapa Valley Family Resource Center (MVFRC) building on the north end of the main street in Overton.
The storm drain at the corner of Moapa Valley Blvd and Bonelli Ave. has long been insufficient to handle storm flows there. The drain often backs up in rain events and frequently floods into the northeast corner of the building, said MVFRC Board President Norita Espinosa in an interview with The Progress.
“It seems like every time it rains we have a mess to clean up in our office,” Espinosa said. “But this was different. This is one of the worst we have seen. The whole corner was affected.”
The flood water left about 3 inches of mud and water on the floor throughout the building.
Espinosa said that the Center had been undergoing renovation and updates to its space. “We had just painted all the walls and now they are all muddy,” she said. “A lot of our thrift store merchandise just had to be thrown away because it got wet and muddy. We just couldn’t salvage it.”
Espinosa said that the center was already in dire straits in its funding. This only made matters much worse, she said.
“We are hoping that the community will step up and help us through this,” Espinosa said. “We may need to have some fundraisers to recover from this. And we can certainly use all the volunteers we can get in the cleanup.”
This time, the water on that corner rose even higher than usual and flooded into the old Dalley’s Barber Shop building which is now a hair styling shop owned by Josh Turpening.
Turpening, got into the building last December and began renovating for his new shop. He opened on March 1 of this year.
“I put quite a bit into a basic remodel that needed to get done,” Turpening said. “We had new furnishings and redid the bathroom and updated the whole thing to make it look nicer that it was.”
The flood put about two inches of water and mud onto the floor of the shop. At the time of the interview last week, Turpening did not yet know the extent of the damage.
“We will have to see as we get things cleaned up just what will have to be replaced,” Turpening said.
Espinosa made a public comment about the flooding during the Moapa Valley Town Advisory Board (MVTAB) meeting on Wednesday night, Sept. 14. She made an appeal for help.
“We really need to do something because every time it rains like that, we flood,” she said.
MVTAB member Brian Burris sympathized with Espinosa. But he pointed out that the storm drain problem at that corner was part of the State Highway 169. Therefore, it would be a Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) issue, he said.
A little further up Moapa Valley Blvd. is Cal’s Auto Repair near the intersection of Whitmore St. This is another area of regular flooding which was affected.
Several old detention basins in the hills to the west of that area had been part of an old sand mine operation. The basins were required to be breached several years ago by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers because they had never been sufficiently engineered. Since then, the area down Bryner Ave., between the Overton Power District and Moapa Valley Water District buildings and around the corner on the south side of the highway has always flooded severely. That includes Cal’s Auto shop.
In the MVTAB meeting, Lois Hall expressed frustration with this ongoing problem.
“I am tired of being flooded out,” she said. “This is the second time my office has flooded. My yard has been flooded. My house was very nearly flooded. Something has got to be done about the flood control!”
Related to this problem is another chronic flooding issue a bit further north in the Cottonwood Ave. neighborhood.
Whitney Donohue, who has lived for many years in that area, had been doing some renovations on her house when the floods came last week.
“Part of what we were doing is adding a new septic tank,” Donohue said. “Mainly it is because the old one had been flooded so much.”
Donohue woke on Wednesday morning to find her new septic tank floating in flood water in her yard.
Donohue said that she had appealed to the MVTAB about a year ago on this issue. She had asked that something be done about this ongoing problem. She was told that most of the flood control efforts is going to building a retention basin in Logandale, north of the Clark County Fairgrounds, to stop flooding across the fairgrounds and Grant Bowler Elementary School. This was upsetting to Donohue.
“A group of us residents were told that, instead of addressing the flooding on the west side of Moapa Valley where the majority of affected residents live, the county was choosing to build the first of six water retention basins on the east side of the valley by the fairgrounds,” Donohue said. “Because obviously county property is much more important than that of constitutents.”
But in an interview with The Progress last week, County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick said that she has been working on solutions and that help is on the way.
Kirkpatrick confirmed that the east Logandale detention basin is already in the pipeline. Design on the basin is completed and the project is funded. She said that the project was set to begin construction soon. It will alleviate major flooding along Whipple Ave.
“Once it gets started it should take about nine months to complete,” Kirkpatrick said.
But concurrent with that project, Kirkpatrick has also been working on resolving the flooding from the western washes affecting Lois Hall, Whitney Donohue and many other residents of that area.
“We have been working with Nevada Department of Environmental Protection, a state agency on that for almost four years now,” Kirkpatrick said. “I believe we just got the paperwork in the last six months to be able to rebuild that dam actually.”
With that paperwork completed, the Regional Flood Control District will be able to build those retention basins back correctly, Kirkpatrick said.
“So, in short, we are almost done with all the paperwork,” Kirkpatrick concluded. “Then I can go find the funding for it. So that will be a good thing for those folks. It just takes some time and I certainly understand the frustration.”
