BYPASS PIPES REPAIRED UNDER LAKE LAS VEGAS

Nine months and $3 million later, repairs are now complete on a pair of pipelines that threatened to fail and take Lake Las Vegas with them.

Earlier this month, workers finished reinforcing the two 7-foot-wide pipes that divert the flood-prone Las Vegas Wash beneath the artificial lake.

A substantial break in one of those 2-mile-long pipes could have caused the lake above to drain like water from a bathtub.

"This wasn't a sky-is-falling type of warning. There was a real concern that the pipes could fail," said Kirk Brynjulson, vice president of land development at Lake Las Vegas.

Resort officials and Henderson city leaders will hold a news conference at 10 a.m. today to publicize completion of the work.

Henderson owns the pipelines, but Lake Las Vegas maintains them and paid for the repairs.

"We want people to know this lake is very, very safe," said resort spokeswoman Robyn Kinard. "The beauty of Lake Las Vegas isn't going anywhere."

There is another reason for the news conference: After a year of headlines about its bankruptcy, the ritzy, 3,600-acre development is looking for some positive publicity for a change.

The resort lost $11.5 million in May and $60.7 million overall since filing for bankruptcy in July 2008. That came after Santa Barbara, Calif.-based developer Transcontinental Corp. defaulted on a $540 million loan with Credit Suisse.

Since then, owners of the Ritz-Carlton also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the once-public Falls and Reflection Bay golf courses closed, leaving the private South Shore Golf Club as the lake's only remaining links.

Meanwhile, like the rest of Southern Nevada, Lake Las Vegas has been stung by foreclosures and falling property values, especially in its condominium developments.

Outward signs of distress are harder to find elsewhere in the development, but they do exist. On Grand Miramar Drive in the guard-gated South Shore subdivision, dead landscaping surrounds a 4,200-square-foot estate now priced to sell at $835,000.

It is a speck of hardship in an otherwise unblemished neighborhood of custom-built estate homes, some of them costing millions of dollars.

Jim Slama, owner and broker of Lake Las Vegas Village Realty, said some South Shore residents -- Celine Dion comes to mind -- are wealthy and successful enough to be "recession-proof."

"This is a resort. Most of these are second, third and fourth homes," he said.

Those two pipes made it all possible.

Lake Las Vegas was built directly on top of the wash channel that carries a constant flow of treated wastewater from the Las Vegas Valley to Lake Mead. Las Vegas Wash also serves as the valley's only outlet for storm water and urban runoff.

In a major flood on the wash, the pipes are designed to carry a portion of the flow while Lake Las Vegas takes the rest. Some of the floodwater then can be released from the lake through its 4,300-foot-long earthen dam.

The wash enters the pipes just across Lake Las Vegas Parkway from the Ritz-Carlton. The pipes empty back into the wash's natural channel on the other side of the earthen dam, at the base of a cliff topped by an unfinished condominium development.

Before the work began last fall, both pipes showed an unexpected amount of wear after about 18 years of use. Small jets of water were leaking into the pipe in at least one location, and in several spots the concrete had been scoured down several inches to the steel reinforcement.

The Henderson-based construction firm Hydro-Arch made the repairs.

The work began in the south tunnel, which was shut down several years ago because of deterioration. Once that tunnel was done, the wash was diverted into it so the north tunnel could be drained and fixed.

The job came in about two months late and $50,000 over budget, with weather mostly to blame.

Storms in November and December, including one that blanketed much of the valley with snow, caused the wash to swell with runoff and forced work on the pipes to shut down for four or five days.

Brynjulson said that happened three or four times throughout the project.

Engineers expect the repairs to last 20 years, he said.

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350.