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Flooding In Vegas 1
Thu Feb 19, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook.
"We had a series of slow moving thunderstorms that continually moved over the same area and
they deposited about a year's worth of rainfall for us in a very small area, in about 2 hours
time frame."
That's Andy Bailey, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Las Vegas, talking about
last August's flooding.
AB: We have two problems with the floods here. First of all, our native soil doesn't do a
good job of soaking up the rainfall so any rain that hits the ground tends to run off, you
know, towards Lake Mead. The second problem is, we've experienced explosive growth in the
last 15 or 20 years. The population of Las Vegas is now somewhere around a million and a half
people, where just a couple of decades ago it was less than 100,000. So, with all this
building, you get a lot more concrete and then, obviously, water's not going to soak into
concrete. So, when the rain hits the ground, it runs off. And where all this rainwater maybe
before wouldn't have caused a problem, it would have been out in the middle of a wash in the
desert somewhere, now it's in the middle of somebody's neighborhood.
BY: So your floods this year were a result of the American Monsoon or the Southwest Monsoon?
AB: That's correct. So, some neighborhoods picked up between two and three - and there's a few
unofficial estimates of about four and a half - inches of rain. So that, that obviously is
going to cause some pretty big problems.
There were some 60 swift water rescues where peoples' vehicles had become stalled in the
floodwaters. There was a couple of rescues that occurred via helicopter and literally within a
minute of getting rescued, cars were swept away.
BY: But, fortunately, no one was killed.
AB: That's correct. Nobody was killed. There was somewhere around 15 or 16 million dollars in
damage to homes and businesses.
The Weather Notebook is funded by Subaru of America, and The National Science Foundation.
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