After 20 years of building basins and channels to hold and tame flood waters, the Las Vegas Valley's urban northwest still had surface flooding this summer.
The Sept. 1st incident dumped 4 inches of rainfall on Mount Charleston, where soils and trees were destabilized by a forest fire earlier in the summer. That's a lot of rain for a region whose average annual rainfall is only 4.2 inches a year.
So why do we still have flooding? Is it piecemeal build-out of the master plan? Is it the concentrated focus of our desert cloudbursts? Both, say two of KNPR's guests.
Becky Grismanuskis, member of Mount Charleston Town Advisory Board
Gale Fraser, General Manager and Chief Engineer of Clark County Regional Flood Control District
Steven Ross, Las Vegas councilman for Ward 6