COMMUNITY VIEWPOINT: Proposed Gamebird flood channels a bad idea

Having been on the receiving end of Nye County’s continual flood issue I took notice to your article written by Mark Waite. Historically, whoever has the biggest pocketbook in Nye County always gets their way. Point: Artesia was in a flood plain map until developers moved huge amounts of dirt in the name of landscaping and made it virtually if not almost impossible for their development to flood from water from the fan.

Mountain Falls followed suit and did almost the exact same landscaping marvel and behold they too now escape water flowing from the fan. This water is now collected and directed exclusively down Gamebird Road. Their great master plan calls for all of the water collected within their development to flow toward, you guessed it, Homestead Road. Historically no mention of where it is to go from there because it isn’t their problem anymore.

Now we have to be careful who we point the finger at for “diverting flood water” because this is a very sensitive topic and your paper has me pointing the finger at the commissioners and town board members in numerous front page photos over the years.

I have been a resident of Pahrump for twenty four years now I have seen a lot of blunders. We can lay blame for the first issues on Gamebird and Homestead Road to the county commissioners and the straightening of Homestead Road. The intersection was the same as Pahrump Valley Boulevard when it meets Gamebird Road. The section lines are deviated and the roads don’t line up.

This also goes back to the era when a certain female county commissioner stood up in the Tonopah Todge Mahall and declared she would sue the county if any water was diverted toward her development between Gamebird and Manse Road. The County raised the intersection in its usual engineering feats over 36 inches and created the dyke that diverts the flood water from its natural course traveled hundreds of years toward the dry lake bed. The water that was directed into an area that had no outlet would have to get twenty inches deep before it spilled over the back side of the properties.

This inconvenience caused my home to flood over a dozen times in twenty years. It caused thousands of dollars of crop damage and property damage but your commissioners and town board members said if I don’t like it here just move. This dam was to be corrected when the intersection was recently repaved by placing culverts under the north side of the intersection.

As history has it they were conveniently omitted and resulting in numerous properties being flooded not once but twice this past summer.

Now we are proposing two flood channels running down Gamebird Road and ending nowhere. I urge people to think of the problem of millions of gallons of water collected and just sitting in a cesspool with flood debris with no place to go.

The county has held no public meetings on this and other projects. We are the constituents of this county and we need accurate plans and engineering, not fairy tales and wishful dreams. The era of Yau and water running uphill has to stop. We need public impact weighed, a solid plan approved and funded before we dig a ditch that ends up killing people and making our community a bigger eyesore. When it is completed who is going to maintain it and who is going to fund the price tag?

Put the culverts under Homestead Road like was originally planned and let the water run like it did before. Stop raising roads and creating rice paddies of our properties because you are too lazy to remove dirt and do it right. Hold the developments accountable to hold their water in their developments and not pass the problem onto other non-suspecting citizens.