Off-Road Vehicle Contribute to Flood Damage in One Johnson Lane Neighborhood
A mountain is being destroyed, and the neighborhood below it is being polluted by off-road vehicles in Douglas County.
Hot Springs Mountain is on BLM land, and it towers right above the neighborhood known as Johnson Lane.
The mountain has been cut up by a web of trails created by off-road vehicles.
Heavy use of the trails pulverizes the soil and the trails become loose and unable to support even foot traffic yet alone the vehicle traffic. The off-road operators then cut new (bypass) trails. Ultimately the new trails get pulverized and the process starts again.
On July 20, 2014 a thunder storm hit this area and dropped a lot of rain in a short period of time. The trails intercepted the natural mountain drainage and concentrated all the water into the trails. The trails drained into each other and eventually came down in the form of two major rivers that brought all the pulverized soil into the neighborhood below. The neighborhood this flood damaged sits between the mountain and the Buckbrush Wash. It is not designated by FEMA as a flood zone, and this flash flood would not have caused all the damage it did had it not been for these trails. The yards and garages filled up with dirt as much as two feet high -- wall-to-wall. The amount of dirt that came into this neighborhood was astonishing. Homeowners and the county are still cleaning yards, homes and streets.
The mountain needs protection, the neighborhood needs protection, and people need protection.
The off-road vehicle operators need to understand how their activity is affecting the homes and people that live close to BLM. They should exercise common courtesy and move their activity further into BLM and away from residential areas.
BLM and Douglas County need to exercise their duty and help motivate the off-road vehicle operators to stay away from people’s homes.
Douglas County leaders and BLM need to accept the fact that these trails are now known washes that drain the mountain directly into the homes.
It is unacceptable, and it is against engineering and planning codes to allow occupied homes to exist in the direct path of a wash. The county and BLM have allowed for such conditions to arise, and they need to work with extreme urgency to remedy this problem.
A web site was setup to detail how off-road vehicles contributed to the damage of the July flood.
The pictures and video showing how the mountain drained and the damage to the landscape can be seen at www.DouglasCountyNV.org.