By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
The lower Moapa Valley was hit hard Saturday by a violent summer thunderstorm. A characteristically sunny and hot day, with highs reaching about 110 degrees, quickly turned unstable as black clouds gathered in the late afternoon to the north of the valley.
The storm blew in from the northeast and hit at around 6:30 pm. The worst of it lasted about 45 minutes. With it came wind gusts exceeding 70 mph and a sudden deluge of .77 inches of rain seemingly all at once, according to weather station reports from the Overton Power District local office.
The heavy winds caused damage to the signage of many local businesses. The gale also uprooted many trees or caused breaks to large limbs.
The wind lifted a whole section of heavy clay roofing tiles off of the garage roof of Becky Kesl, 80, who lives on Lewis Ave. in Overton.
“It was very loud and so hard,” Kesl said of the wind gusts that pummelled her home. “At first I thought that we were having a hailstorm. But it was just the force of the rain being blown by that wind.”
“All I could do was go inside and pray that the whole roof wouldn’t blow off,” added Kesl.
The sheer volume of rain brought a few instances of flooding in Overton. The Overton Wash just south of the downtown area became a raging torrent which closed State Highway 169 and cut off access to Overton neighborhoods south of town. NDOT crews worked late into the evening clearing the mud and debris from the roadway at that location.
Floodwaters gathered in a customary downtown low spot on Moapa Valley Blvd. and Bonelli Ave. This time, however, the water rose high enough to flood out the office of the Cappalappa Family Resource center. A large group of volunteers gathered on Sunday morning to clean up the mess.
“We are expecting that the office will have to be closed for a period of about two weeks while things get cleaned up,” Espinoza said. “We are going to have to get some professionals in to take care of some of it.”
About a half dozen residents at the north end of the Robbin’s Nest Trailer Park in Overton were inundated with flood waters coming from the adjacent hills to the west. Robbin’s Nest resident Geri Leavitt said that the floodwaters flowed along the alignment of an old irrigation ditch which had recently been put underground.
“We have never had this problem before because the ditch used to act like a flood channel and carry the water away,” Leavitt said on Sunday morning after the incident. “Now there is nowhere for the water to go but over the embankment and down here.”
Leavitt said that the flood had risen fast, coming in through doors and windows of their mobile home. Leavitt and her husband had been working since 4:00 am trying to clean up the mess, she said.
Just a few doors down, Kathy Serrano had some similar troubles.
“The water was seemed like it was flowing from every direction,” Serrano said. “It just kept coming.”
Serrano’s house was surrounded by about 2 feet of water. And the combination of wind and rain blasted the water through the back door of her mobile home flooding a large portion of the interior.
“I was so scared,” Serrano said. “I didn’t know how I was going to dry out my carpet and everything else.”
