The 1975 Caesars Palace flood is remembered by locals because the force of water was so strong that it shoved several cars straight out of the Caesars parking lot and into a nearby culvert, plugging it. Gerry Hester, an engineer with the Southern Nevada Water Authority, remembers it because the flood "did all sorts of damage to the Las Vegas Wash"—the Las Vegas Valley's chief drainage tributary. Prior to that flood, the wash was full of concrete culverts, which to that point had acted as a series of dams. The flood washed these away.
The wash flows 7.5 miles in a broad curve from east of Boulder Highway and south of Tropicana to Lake Las Vegas. It is one of the Valley's most important natural resources and one of its least appreciated. That was also the year—1975— Hester got his first look at the Las Vegas Wash. He was sent down to do some surveys. The wash, he remembers, was "pretty wild, pretty desolate." Overgrown and covered in salt cedars, there were enough wild animals down there that gun clubs would often hunt across the Wash. "I walked across here, stepped down one foot into the water, waded 100 feet, and stepped back." Places that in 1975 were only a few feet deep are now 35 to 40 feet deep in places. The Las Vegas Wash is—well, was and is struggling to be again—a wetlands.
Wetlands act as a final natural filter for water that funnels to the wash across the Valley's 1,600 square miles before it enters Lake Mead and is then pumped back into the Valley so that we all have water to drink. Prior to urbanization the wash was basically a dry channel that received storm- water runoff. As the city grew, so did the amount of water entering the wash—shallow groundwater, urban runoff, and effluent. All this water finds its way to Lake Mead, and so does more and more of the wash itself —in the form of sediment.
As the city grows, so does the wash. It grows deeper. It grows wider. More water flows through it. And that's not good. What Hester and $125 million is doing out here is trying to prevent that. If left unchecked, the wash, which only makes up 1 percent of water flow into Lake Mead, would push 2.5 million tons of sediment into the lake over the next 20 years. (One million tons have already entered the lake since 1975.)
"That's the equivalent of stacking sediment on a football-sized field about 73 stories high," Hester says. "When that gets to Lake Mead, automatically it destroys the fishery, it hurts water quality."
So what? you say. Well, for one, as the wash has cut deeper and deeper it's intercepted shallow groundwater, which is contaminated with, among other things, percolates—rocket fuel. "All of that then flows into Lake Mead." Two, sediment can throw off the delicate balance of algae blooms in the lake, which underlay its ecosystem. And three? Well, three is Uncle Sam. "If we did nothing, we would have to deal with federal regulators," says Bruce Sillitoe, principal planner with Clark County's Department of Parks and Community Service. Neglect of the wash would violate both the federal Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.
"It would not be free to ignore the wash," says Sillitoe. "It would be very expensive to ignore the wash."
The wash floodplain was formed at least two million years ago, with sediments from the erosion of surrounding mountain ranges. Flows in the wash had began increasing once the city was founded in 1905, but even by 1928 the perennial flow of water in the wash was only 1 cubic foot per second, which is basically just a trickle. As more people moved to the city, its desert-shrub landscape yielded to a "greenbelt that included ponds and wetlands," according to the Las Vegas Wash Coordinating Committee. By 1955, growing saturation of the floodplain created a constant flow of water in the wash—in 50 years the city had reversed a geological pattern some 2,500 years old.
In the mid 1950s, Clark County formed its water reclamation district and built a plant; the city of Las Vegas followed with its own plant, and before the decade was over treated wastewater began flowing into the wash, increasing wetland vegetation in the wash.
The mountainous texture of the Valley is more marked on the east side, where a mélange of mountains of copper and purple and brown and tan dance along the horizon. From a distance, the wash cuts through the heart of this rugged landscape like a green-velvet carpet. What you notice about the wash when you get close is how much texture there is, how you can sort of get lost. It is rugged and wild. It has the reassuring pulse of a busy stream. In some places you can smell chlorine, in others just the heavy, muddy, marshy smell of a Midwestern river.
There are plenty of fish and wildlife—carp and catfish, beavers, jackrabbits and muskrats. There is also plenty of salt cedar, but most has been deliberately burned, because it uses so much water that it chokes out other habitat for birds and wildlife.
In 1999, Patrick Gaffey, cultural program supervisor with the county's parks department, was tapped to film a documentary about the wash. Though Gaffey had grown up in Las Vegas, and his family had been here since 1953, he knew little about the wash. "In the course of the filming, we did the first photography of a live beaver," he says. "However it turns out they've been there forever. This was an amazing revelation for me. When it showed on TV, I think it was a revelation for other people, too."
It was really a swamp, with blue herons, egrets, and Ibis birds (from Egypt); also crawdads, and even a daytime owl called a burrowing owl. As Gaffey realized, the wash takes you out of being in Las Vegas and restores you to the West. Vegas, of course, exists as a kind of buffer to the West, a place where we defeat the West. The wash reminds us that we're still in the West, and that the West is richer than we expected.
But starting in the 1960s, the flow of water began to grow beyond the ability of wetland vegetation to absorb it. "Excess water began to erode the floodplain," says Hester. By the time the daily water flow had increased to 37 feet per cubic second in 1969, erosion had become visually evident.
By the early 1970s, biologist Vern Bostick was the first to realize there was head-cutting, or erosion at the upper end of the stream. He went to the county, Gaffey says, and told them something needed to be done—otherwise the water would drain out the entire swamp. But all the county heard was that more water down the wash meant more water returning to Lake Mead, which meant more water credits for the Valley. The county did nothing.
Well, almost nothing: They did form an advisory committee to restore wetlands to the wash; one of its recommendations was to form a task force (which doubtless would also have studied how to restore wetlands to the wash), but the task force was not actually established until 1986. Local governments did enter a consent decree with the Environmental Protection Agency in 1979 to improve the quality of water entering the wash by setting limitations on effluents.
"And just as he predicted it moved right up and started draining," says Sillitoe. "Now there are canyons in what used to be a huge swamp. Now we're spending millions to rebuild as much of the swamp as we can." The goal is to restore 50 percent of what once was there.
"It's a human tendency that you see everywhere," he says. "People basically don't act unless there's a crisis. It's like what's happening with global warming. Why should we waste our money and energy on something that, who knows? Might just go away."
By the mid-1980s, water was flowing through the wash at 100 cubic feet per second, and marsh acreage had fallen 80 percent. A major flood in 1984 finally exposed the Valley's water lateral, the one and only pipe carrying drinking water into the Valley. "It was suddenly exposed by the erosion and in threat of damage," Hester says. "There was a fear the pipe would collapse."
The lateral was replaced and in 1986, the task force that was recommended way back in 1973 was assigned to halt the wash's erosion problem. The county backed a water surcharge bill with the state legislature that would have charged Colorado River water users a fee and provided revenue to stabilize the wash. The bill never passed.
In the early 1990s, the wash was rerouted through two enormous pipes in order to construct Lake Las Vegas. In 1991, Nevada residents approved $13.3 million for erosion control. Finally, in 1998, the Las Vegas Wash Coordination Committee was formed, made up of 28 members from local, state and federal agencies. The task, by this point, had become much larger. Water was rushing through the wash faster than ever before. The total acreage of wetland vegetation had fallen from its peak of 2,400 acres to just more than 300, and the destructive salt cedar brush had grown to 1,021 acres.
The new master plan called for channel stabilizing—flattening the channel with a series of erosion control structures called weirs to slow the water down and stop erosion. From there, engineers will stabilize the sides of the bank, and then finally they will re-vegetate the wash with wetland and riparian species. The first step in stabilizing the wash was building a series of weirs, low-lying barriers designed to trap sediment. (Think of them as mini-dams.) The committee built the first of a projected 23 weirs in 2000. So far eight have been built, and 42 acres of land have been revegetated. Money for the stabilization work, budgeted at $125 million, has come from a local quarter-cent sales tax, as well as from state and federal sources.
They expect to complete the last project in 2013.
The master plan, spearheaded by the water authority, created a catalyst for other agencies. "That was very helpful to bring everybody to the table."
"When you take something like the LV wash that was an eyesore and a dumping ground," says Sillitoe, "it took a lot of years for people to understand there was value there." The phenomenon took years to catch on across the country, as well.
On a tour of the wash with Hester, we visited the largest of the county's new weirs. Called the Rainbow Gardens Weir, it resembles nothing so much as an open dam. The weir is two concrete walls that extend out into the wash, with an opening between that allows water to first step down into a holding well, and then pass through a second, lower concrete lip, and finally over a barrier of rocks, beyond which the water appears to have slowed down.
This weir was the largest and most expensive to date, although the county is trying for the most part to build weirs that appear to the naked eye to be natural rock formations. Yet even these rock structures still have extensive foundation work, with cutoff walls to prevent seepage.
Farther down the stream the bank has been stabilized with rocks on both sides, and then overlain with what looks like a frozen stream of concrete. Many of the rocks from the wash are the recycled remains of old casinos —the Aladdin, Rancho, Desert Inn, Caesars, the Dunes—as well as pieces of the Spaghetti Bowl.
The signs of human involvement are everywhere. We pass a small dump of tires, scraps and other debris. "We had 14 vehicles we pulled out of the wash this year. We had them all lined up by type." Near the wash are construction vehicles, tanks and huge black plastic tubes. Some junk and garbage, motor oil, car batteries, and a few big gas drums. There are plans to jam in a large road just to the south, a backdoor path for Lake Las Vegas residents to get back to the city. The road would seem likely to change the nature of the area. Development may encroach—although two rows of power lines, like a convoy of metal washerwomen, arms outstretched, may lower property values. (The lines crackle and snap threateningly as you pass under them.)
County crews are constantly readjusting their designs in the wake of flooding. "We've had about four 100-year floods since I've been here," says Robin Rockey, a spokesperson for the SNWA. After a storm, the wash may have dropped another 2 or 3 feet.
Still, Hester keeps an upbeat demeanor. And why not? Guy's seen it all down here. He's had dogs turned loose on him by squatters, who were leery of having people around. He even had a gun pulled on him once. How did he defuse that situation?
"We left."
While the engineers transform the wash, two local artists have recorded the changes in their own way. Painter Robert Beckman has been using the wash as inspiration for years—as a sort of Edenic Las Vegas that he often contrasts with today's neonopolis, in sly satires of master paintings. Beckman based one painting, The 100 Year Flood, on a painting by French master Poussin called The Deluge. The painting depicts a group of people trying to survive a ravenous flood, with Mt. Ararat in the background. In the background of Beckman's painting, he cheekily substituted the Luxor.
"It's one of four desert wetlands in the world," says Beckman of the wash. "It's a unique, to say the least, ecology. The ideas of finding beaver in Las Vegas? What more do you have to say?"
Beckman's friend, photographer and local art historian Fred Sigman had been photographing the wash since 1968, when he was a high- school junior looking to jump-start a career as a wildlife photographer. Twenty years later, after he and Beckman took a hike around Mt. Charleston, Sigman decided he wanted to catalog the changes in the Valley rather than simply gripe about them—after all, he figured, his work has "always dealt with the social issues of landscape."
Beckman suggested he reinvestigate the wash. So Sigman decided to return to the wash and photograph it for 12 months. The following July, just a few weeks before Sigman was going to wrap up his project, a flood ripped through the Valley. "It was the parting of the Red Sea there."
That morning, July 7, he had planned to do some sunrise photography of the county's new flood-control structure. The day was thick with humidity, and as the morning went on the water began turning brown. It also rose. What had been high ground went underwater. "There were areas of the wash where whole embankments, 15, 20 feet, the water was just cutting through them."
The channel formed an oxbow where he was; when the flood was over it had straightened out. The county's flood-control structure washed away. It was 6 or 7 feet tall. "That whole thing had gotten blown out," Beckman notes. "That blew me away. It was an incredible force."
There was a group of squatters on the other side of the embankment, standing right at the ledge. The ledge kept sliding away, and they kept moving their possessions back a few feet, and then gradually moving their stuff again.
"The whole cliff in front of (one guy) falls off," Beckman adds. "He could have so easily been on that cliff. But he's standing on the foot that's left."
Despite the damage, Sigman held to his original plan and stopped shooting a few weeks later. In all he shot between 500 and 600 negatives. About 90 percent of the landscapes in his shots is gone now, "either because of the flash flood or because of the resulting re-engineering of the county to prevent this from happening again."
Sigman came back around 2002 to take some new pictures. His late-'90s shots were in color, his attempt to "aestheticize" the wash. The more recent pictures were shot in a more elegiac black and white. "I can't say the direction the county has taken is one that I wholeheartedly endorse. While I understand the engineering need, what we've done in the Las Vegas Wash is we've weeded out the wildness."
At the upper end of the wash, the county is building a wetlands park. Right now it has 130 acres of streams, ponds and trails. By the middle of next year it will have tripled in size. The wetlands park will ultimately grow to 2,900 acres. Sigman looks with suspicion at the park. "You're not allowed to experience the environment aesthetically when everything has been determined for you," he says. "What is missing now is that sense of exploration into an environment in which you can actually, physically get lost.
"Up until just the past couple of years, one thing that used to be there is when you dropped down into the wash, you had no idea that you were near Las Vegas. That's always been one of the best qualities about the wash. It's not manicured. It's not wheelchair-accessible. I don't think our engineering stewards have done enough to protect that."
"It seems like the county has been concerned principally with real estate and not with saving the wash," Beckman says. "What they've done is save the water just enough to save the real estate."
Nevertheless, the work goes on. Officials proudly point out that the new wash is working. Percolate concentration in the lake is down two-thirds from three years ago. Total sediment is down 80 percent. And if what was wild has to be tamed to, um, sort of make it wild again, well, that's the West.
"It's the largest open space in the Las Vegas Valley," Sillitoe notes. "We're going to preserve and make it something people are proud of.