Troubled visitors observe storm water flooding the Linq Hotel’s garage in Las Vegas — exactly as it was designed to. (Image: nypost.com
“This is urban flooding in Las Vegas!” reports a shocked visitor holding his cellphone camera
at a fast-moving torrent of ankle-deep water. “It’s coming out of the parking garage at the Linq Hotel!”
Seven out of ten YouTube videos, including those from Fox News and the New York Post, featured the scene in the Linq garage to highlight the severity of the flooding that hit Las Vegas two weeks ago.
This is due to the fact that few visitors to Las Vegas are aware that the Linq garage was originally intended to flood.
Hell or High Water
The Flamingo Capri Motel was built on a concrete overhang above a water feature that the motel referred to as a “Venetian canal” when it first opened in 1959.
It was actually an open flood channel called the Flamingo Wash. A branch of the Las Vegas Wash — a 12-mile arroyo feeding most of Las Vegas Valley’s overflow stormwater into Lake Mead — the Flamingo Wash collects rainfall from as far away as the Spring Mountains 60 miles west.
A summer rainstorm that occurred on July 3, 1975, the Thursday before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, caused a flash flood that overflowed the Flamingo Wash. In the parking area of Caesars Palace, 300 cars were destroyed by raging seas. Some were discovered hundreds of miles distant.
The damage was estimated to be about $25 million in today’s money.
On July 3, 1975, a flash flood overflowed the banks of the Flamingo Wash and destroyed hundreds of cars parked outside Caesars Palace. (Image: reviewjournal.com)
Two years later, the Flamingo Wash was directed into man-made tunnels under Interstate 15, Caesars Palace, and Las Vegas Blvd. to lessen the likelihood of a repeat incident. But where one of the tunnels now emptied, Flamingo Capri owner Ralph Engelstad had already laid the groundwork for a 19-story skyscraper and parking garage.
All of what was to be the Imperial Palace’s construction would have needed to be taken down and rebuilt in order to dig a tunnel deep enough to continue underground.
Driving Rain
The engineers at Engelstad instead developed a novel alternative. They created a detour through the Imperial Palace garage’s first floor. Whenever there is flooding, stormwater gurgles up from the underground tube and into the parking garage. After crossing the first level, it enters a duct below a ramp that leads back below ground.
When flooding doesn’t happen, which in the desert is 99% of the time, visitors have no reason to think the parking garage serves a secondary purpose.
Engelstad’s solution wasn’t a very good one. In 1983, an 8-foot wall of water gushed through the garage. It swept away 10 cars, muddied more than 20 ground-floor rooms and the casino floor, and chased 500 gamblers onto Las Vegas Boulevard. In 2004, two men had to be rescued by firefighters after their car stalled in flood water behind the garage, the same spot where six more people had to be rescued in 2017.
However, typically only parking operations are impacted. When a flood is expected, the garage is closed to the public and all first-floor vehicles are removed. Once the rain stops, the floodwaters subside and normal operations may resume. The worst case scenario is leaving visitors stranded for a few hours on the garage’s top floors.
No Better Solution
While the system is hardly optimal, according to a 2010 Las Vegas Review-Journal article, the Clark County Regional Flood Control District determined that it was impossible to install a better one without weakening the foundation of the Imperial Palace.
When Harrah’s Entertainment acquired the hotel in 2005, then-chairman Gary Loveman told investors it might be imploded to expand adjacent properties. This could have ended the ever-flooding parking garage once and for all. But then the Great Recession hit, and the debt-plagued company opted to build the Linq over the old bones of the Imperial Palace instead.
To this day, whenever the Clark County Regional Flood Control District predicts a big storm, its first warning call goes to the Linq. Not because it’s in danger of flooding, but because it’s supposed to.
Authored by Corey Levitan reporter for Casino.org Rephrased by The Mystic Gambler.
Corey writes the continuing series, “Vegas Myths”
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