We Mapped Every Flood Tunnel Under Las Vegas and Gave It Away Free

Joe Lombardo rolled a red light, got pulled over, said his own name, and drove off without a ticket. Fifteen seconds. No accountability at all. So we are releasing something that offers the public the exact same level of accountability the governor lives with. None. Here is the map.

Open the Vegas Tunnel Map →
Free. No app. Works on your phone.

What we put out

It is called Vegas Tunnel Maps and it lives at tastebueno.com/pages/tunnels. Free. No app, no login, no paywall. It shows the storm drain tunnels, the concrete channels, the natural washes, and the multi-use paths under and across the whole valley, color coded, tap any line for its real dimensions. Walkable tunnels in red. Over three hundred miles of them.

We built it because the governor of this state got to skip the rules on camera and the union called it routine. Fine. If the powerful get to operate with zero transparency, the public should at least get the transparency the government already owes them. That is what this is.

None of this is secret, and none of it is illegal

Every line on the map came from the Clark County Regional Flood Control District and the Clark County GIS office. It is public record. The government surveyed this infrastructure, drew it, and published it as open data for anyone to download. We did not hack anything. We did not trespass to make it. We took files the county puts online on purpose and made them readable on a phone.

Releasing public data is not a crime. Reading a map is not a crime. We identified most of the entrances the same way anyone can, by cross referencing the county's own published lines with the county's own published aerials. The surreal part is not that we found it. The surreal part is how much of a city's guts are sitting in a public download folder, and how few people ever look.

A storm drain is more transparent than the governor

Sit with that. The county will hand you a full schematic of a fifty year old drainage tunnel, dimensions and all, no questions asked. The man who ran the largest police department in the state for eight years, then took the governor's office, needed three words and a wave to make a traffic stop disappear, and nobody will tell you why no ticket was written. One of these things is documented down to the barrel count. The other one is Joe Lombardo.

We are not the ones who decided infrastructure should be public and accountability should be optional. We just noticed the gap and pointed at it.

A word on the mustache vandal

We are not the first to needle this governor, and it would be wrong not to mention the one who did it with a spray can. When Lombardo's biggest campaign sign in the city went up, a mustache showed up on his face within days. We wrote about that already. Nobody knows who did it, and we are not claiming he started anything or saw anything coming. It is just a good story, and it rhymes with this one. When the official channels stop holding power to account, the street tends to fill the gap, one small act at a time.

How to not die down there

Since we are handing out the map, here is the part that actually keeps you alive, and none of it is beer.

• Check the whole valley's weather, not just your block. These tunnels flood from rain that fell miles away. If there is a storm anywhere upstream, stay out. A flash flood arrives with no warning and moves faster than you can run.
• Never go alone, and tell someone where you are. Give a person outside your entry point and the time you will be back. There is no signal underground to call for help.
• Know your exits before you go in. Count them on the map. Always have more than one way out.
• Bring real light. A headlamp and a backup, not just your phone. When the phone dies you are blind.
• Read the walls. The stain and debris lines show how high the water gets. If you see or hear moving water, get out and get high right then.

And one that is not about you. People live in these tunnels, hundreds of them, and it is their home, not a set. If you cross paths with someone down there, be decent, give them room, do not film them, and do not touch their things. You are the guest.

Dead reckoning: finding yourself when the GPS dies

Your phone finds you by listening to satellites. Put a few feet of concrete over your head and that conversation ends. The blue dot freezes, or worse, it wanders around and lies to you. This is true in every one of these tunnels, and it is the single most dangerous thing about relying on a phone underground.

The old answer, the one sailors used for centuries before GPS existed, is dead reckoning. If you know where you started, which way you went, and how far you have gone, you know roughly where you are. No satellites required. Here is how you actually do it with this map.

• Lock your entry point while you still have signal. Stand at the mouth of the tunnel, hit the locate button, and let the map pin you. The second you lose signal that pin stops moving, and that frozen dot is now your anchor. It is the last place the sky could see you.
• Note which way the tunnel runs. Look at the map before you drop in. These lines run mostly straight for long stretches, so one heading usually holds for a while.
• Count your distance. A normal stride is about two and a half feet, and it takes roughly two thousand steps to cover a mile. Tap any tunnel on the map and it tells you that segment's real length in feet. Count your paces against that number and you always know how deep you are.

Now the part most people get wrong. Do not trust your phone's compass down there, and do not trust any app that claims to track your steps underground. Storm tunnels are wrapped in steel rebar, and steel drags a phone's magnetometer all over the place. Step-tracking software piles up error with every stride until the position it shows you is pure fiction, and a map that lies to you underground is worse than no map at all. Low tech wins here. Known entry point, known direction, counted distance, checked against the tunnel lengths on the screen. That is dead reckoning, and it does not need a signal.

This is also why you load the map before you go. Underground it is not fetching anything. It is the paper chart in your pocket, and dead reckoning is how you read it.

Read the warning before you get ideas

These tunnels flood. They exist to move storm water and they do it fast with no siren. People die in them every year, and there is no cell signal and no GPS once you are underground. The map opens with that warning for a reason. It is a reference tool built from public data, not an invitation to go get killed in a culvert. What you do with a map is on you, same as what Joe Lombardo does with a red light is on him.

If the whole thing makes you want to say something back to the people who run this valley, that is what we make. A political stencil puts it on a wall in about a minute, and nobody needs to know your name to read it.

Related reading from TasteBueno

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