Mountain community still high, dry 2 years after Carpenter 1 fire

Local media outlets have been marking the two-year anniversary of the Carpenter 1 fire by revisiting the lightning-sparked blaze that scorched 28,000 acres in the Spring Mountains.

The homeowners in Trout Canyon needed no such reminder.

They have been living with the effects of the fire every day since early July 2013, when flames ruptured the 50-year-old above-ground pipe that delivered water to the tiny community from a mountain spring 3 miles away. Then, in late August of that year, a flash-flood tore through the burned area and washed away the entire gravity-fed water system, including repairs finished hours earlier by the Las Vegas Valley Water District.

The dozen or so homes and vacation cabins high in the canyon 60 miles west of Las Vegas have been without a permanent water source ever since, and relief is still at least another 18 months away for the community of seven or eight year-round residents.

Bob McCormick bought his vacation home in the canyon about six months before Carpenter 1 broke out. Now he’s president of the Trout Canyon Land and Water Users Association, a group of property owners who banded together in 2013 to get the water system rebuilt.

He said that for the past two years, property owners have been hauling their own water up the canyon, paying for water truck deliveries or sharing the output from one home’s groundwater well. Another homeowner paid to drill an expensive new 800-foot-deep well.

McCormick’s solution was to install a 1,200 gallon storage tank at his place, which he fills each month or so with well water from his neighbor about a mile away. He said it usually takes him all day to drive back and forth between the well and his tank, filling and emptying a pair of 55-gallon drums in the back of his pickup.

He needs the water for nonpotable household uses and to keep his chickens and rabbits alive, but his landscaping is on its own. McCormick said he expects to lose roughly 15 percent of his fruit trees.

One former resident of Trout Canyon gave up and moved away, and McCormick said that person’s house is now on the market as a short sale at about 30 to 40 percent of what it was worth before Carpenter 1. It hasn’t sold yet, and neither have three or four other homes on the market there.

“It’s impossible to move them without the water,” McCormick said.

Eventually, homeowners in Trout Canyon hope to run a new supply line to their spring in a cave farther up the mountain. But unlike the old metal pipe, which was largely made from World War II-era munitions canisters, the new system will have to be built to current safe-drinking-water standards and will most likely need to be buried.

Homeowners are still trying to scrape together the money they’ll need to pay for the work.

So far, the association has secured about $1.5 million in grants and low-interest loans through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development program and a state revolving fund.

McCormick said more than $100,000 of that money has already been committed to engineering work, environmental and archaeological studies and a roughly $28,000 review by the U.S. Forest Service, which controls the land between Trout Canyon and its water.

“And we haven’t even built anything yet,” he said.

But there’s a much bigger problem looming: The projected cost of the new water infrastructure is $3 million.

“We’re going to be short, and the big question is: Where is that money is going to come from?” McCormick said.

Until they find an answer, those left in Trout Canyon will have to endure a few more anniversaries of a fire and flood they’re never likely to forget.

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Find him on Twitter: @RefriedBrean