ABC News: 'Life underground in Vegas' by Cassie White

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Beneath the neon: Life underground in Vegas News Online's Cassie White

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Updated October 01, 2009 16:29:00

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Beneath the jackpots and flashing lights of Las Vegas is a labyrinth of tunnels and storm water drains housing hundreds of the city's 15,000 homeless.

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In 2002, after reading about a murderer who hid from police in the series of tunnels, journalist Matthew O'Brien started venturing underground to see them for himself. "A guy named Timmy "TJ" Weber murdered his girlfriend and one of her sons and raped her young daughter. He was on the run and used one of these underground flood channels to elude the police," he said.

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EXTERNAL LINK: Shine a Light website

"There was a paragraph in the story that really MAP: United States captured my imagination and it made me wonder what Weber experienced down in these tunnels. So I decided to go down with another writer and we started exploring them together. "[We] were not expecting to find people living in these tunnels - these are flood channels, they can fill up really quickly with water when it's raining heavily. When we stumbled upon our first homeless camp down there we were shocked. "Some of the tunnels are small, maybe 4ft by 4ft, but there are also tunnels you can drive a truck through; they're big and dark." O'Brien, who has written a book about the tunnel dwellers, says up to 700 people often live underground at one time.

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"There's a lot of graffiti down there. Some is just gang graffiti and scrawls, but also some really beautiful mural art and poetry," he told ABC News Online. "Then you have hundreds of people who live in these tunnels throughout the valley and they have camps, which range from a cardboard mat on the floor to a king size bed with a frame and a headboard. "In a wet tunnel late at night I came across this guy whose whole camp was elevated above the run-off. He had used wiring to tie his bed into the tunnel wall, and all of his clothes and shoes were elevated. "Steve and Catherine are a couple that live just west of the strip underneath it. They're an interesting couple who are engaged, very smart, articulate people who have a very elaborate set-up down there - they've got a queen size bed that's elevated on crates, so the floodwater goes underneath it. "I also met a mum who was visiting her son Tyrone in the tunnels. She lived in a different city but she'd come to Vegas to see him and knew that he lived in a tunnel. "She brought plastic bags and boots and other things that he'd need to live in the tunnels, so that was an interesting perspective to get." Violence, flooding He says violence between the homeless, coupled with the threat of flooding, make the tunnels a dangerous place to venture. "It can be extremely dangerous down there. With the flood waters that can come down, there have been

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drownings. It's not healthy at all and it's very isolated, so if something does go wrong, there's no-one really to help you or rescue you," he said. "Even though we don't get much rain, you'll still get a lot of water going through these tunnels from sprinkler system run-off and car wash run-off and escaped ground water, so some of the tunnels are wet year-round." O'Brien says life can be very bleak for tunnel residents, many of them ending up there as a result of drug addiction, or traumatic events. "There's a lot of older people, senior citizens, people in their 60s, war veterans, people who have cancer and AIDS. It's not a very healthy environment down there - just very enclosed and wet," he said. "You'll see people washing their clothes in the run-off that goes through there. They all have different ways of surviving. They go out of the tunnels and pan handle and dumpster dive. "Some people look for money in casinos that's accidentally been left by tourists. Sometimes they can make between 30, 40 bucks a day. "But there are people down there who have more permanent camps and there are people who have part time jobs who live down there. "I would say 95 per cent of the people I've interviewed in the tunnels have openly admitted to alcohol, drugs, gambling or some combination of the three. "The city is a magnet for homeless because you have the warm weather, the winters are very mild, you have the allure of hitting the jackpot in the casinos. Also a lot of people move out here for work and end up on the streets." Shine a Light O'Brien says authorities often overlook the situation underground, which prompted him to set up his own charity to help them. "About six months ago I reached out to HELP of Southern Nevada and we founded a charity organisation of our own called Shine a Light, where I escort their social workers into the tunnels twice a month and introduce them to people and show them the terrain," he said. "They then offer these people all of their services, which is pretty much anything and everything these people would need, from housing, mental health and drug counselling and anything else. "Since we've been doing it, they've housed 12 to 15 people and helped many others down in there. "There's a tradition in Vegas of ignoring bad press and glowing in the positive media attention they get ... so [myself and HELP] are being proactive and doing something about it ourselves." Topics: homelessness, community-and-society, human-interest, united-states

First posted October 01, 2009 10:46:00