Any Urban Exploration planned?

[miltonbradley]

As an UE enthusiast, I would think Las Vegas would have a few options near the strip? Does anyone have knowledge of any hidden areas of the various hotels? i.e. underground access, tunnels, etc. I have read a lot about the underground tunnels for water drainage, but I am having a hard time locating the entrances to these tunnels.

Anyone interested in an outing?

[astcell]

Re: Any Urban Exploration planned?

I got lost taking a short cut one day, ended up under a hotel via a service entrance, it was another city under there. I followed everyone and ended up going through an employee entrance, shower/changing room, and lots of halls before coming out in a casino. Still to this day do not know what one it was, bit no one gave me a second glance.

[streaker69]

Re: Any Urban Exploration planned?

As an UE enthusiast, I would think Las Vegas would have a few options near the strip? Does anyone have knowledge of any hidden areas of the various hotels? i.e. underground access, tunnels, etc. I have read a lot about the underground tunnels for water drainage, but I am having a hard time locating the entrances to these tunnels.

Anyone interested in an outing?

I would highly advice against any unauthorized access to water drainage tunnels of any sort in any city. If you don't know what kind of tunnel it is, and if you don't have proper safety equipment, you could die, quickly. H2S can kill within minutes, and you'll never know you're dying. Not only that, but you cannot be sure when the water level is going to rise suddenly as pumps can start and stop automatically upstream from your location, you could suddenly get overwhelmed in a very high flow and drown.

Not only that, it's trespassing, and you're effectively asking someone here to participate in such activity.

[erehwon]

Re: Any Urban Exploration planned?

I would highly advice against any unauthorized access to water drainage tunnels of any sort in any city. If you don't know what kind of tunnel it is, and if you don't have proper safety equipment, you could die, quickly. H2S can kill within minutes, and you'll never know you're dying. Not only that, but you cannot be sure when the water level is going to rise suddenly as pumps can start and stop automatically upstream from your location, you could suddenly get overwhelmed in a very high flow and drown.

Lemme add here, it doesn't rain much in Las Vegas, BUT this is rainy season in Las Vegas, the last thing you want to do is be in one of those drainage tunnels going under the Strip. Likewise how would you feel if you led one of these tours and Vegas did get 3 inches in a few hours as did happen 10 years ago and either one of your cohorts or one of the first responders drowned trying to save you from the flood?

If you want to hang out with the danger junkies, look into the Defcon Jump.

[streaker69]

Re: Any Urban Exploration planned?

Lemme add here, it doesn't rain much in Las Vegas, BUT this is rainy season in Las Vegas, the last thing you want to do is be in one of those drainage tunnels going under the Strip. Likewise how would you feel if you led one of these tours and Vegas did get 3 inches in a few hours as did happen 10 years ago and either one of your cohorts or one of the first responders drowned trying to save you from the flood?

If you want to hang out with the danger junkies, look into the Defcon Jump.

My main concern here is, that some cities have a combined storm and sanitary sewer (sanitary meaning sewage). If that's true of LV, then that would mean, it doesn't have to rain, there's going to be flow down there. If there's sewage or anything else rotting down there, you're going to find levels of Hydrogen Sulfide. At around 50ppm, you'll quickly lose your sense of smell, but you'd interpret it as that you've just gotten used to the smell, a few minutes later, your breathing will stop, and you'll just fall over. The smell doesn't even have to be a strong smell for there to be H2S present, since H2S is colorless and odorless alone.

Even if LV is not a combined system, there could still have illegal cross connects between sanitary and storm, as well as direct leaks between them. You won't know until you're in trouble.

Going into underground water areas without proper equipment is dangerous, plain and simple. I'm not addressing this to you, erehwon, but to anyone that would think it's a good idea to go into places they don't belong.

Another danger to think about is this, most systems are based upon gravity, LV being mostly flat, cannot use gravity to their advantage to move their flow around, so they'd be using pumpstations. Based upon the size of LV, I bet they have some pretty powerful pumps out there to push their flow. My system here, our biggest pumps are 750HP and able to push about 8000gpm each. I've seen three pumps running at the same time during high flows, so that's about 24000gpm, at a sustained pressure of 70psi. If you were caught in one of those tunnels with that kind of flow coming through, they'd find you at the end of the line basically squished through the sluice gates. I'm certain that LV has bigger pumps than we do.

[valkyrie]

Re: Any Urban Exploration planned?

As an UE enthusiast, I would think Las Vegas would have a few options near the strip? Does anyone have knowledge of any hidden areas of the various hotels? i.e. underground access, tunnels, etc. I have read a lot about the underground tunnels for water drainage, but I am having a hard time locating the entrances to these tunnels.

Anyone interested in an outing?

Read and attend to the other posts made in this thread. There IS a UE run that takes place, above ground, early on Sunday and hits some of the more sequestered areas around the venue. That run is invite only.

Regards,

valkyrie
________________________________________________
sapere aude

[kallahar]

Re: Any Urban Exploration planned?

Following the rules is fun!

Stay out, stay alive!

Don't explore places The Man says to stay out of!

Kallahar


Seriously on the storm drain part, I think there's rain forecasted for vegas next week, so I'll stick to other maintenance areas.

Also note that last year some defconers threw a party in a maintenance area between the speaking halls, and several of them got tresspassed off the property. So don't loiter long enough to get called in!

[Melesse]

Re: Any Urban Exploration planned?

If you had gone allll the way down to the end of the first page, you would have seen a thread that would have answered your questions, or at least been a place to rez for more info.

https://forum.defcon.org/showthread.php?t=10342

Apparently there ARE people who are interested, just not the ones in this thread lol.

Mel

[miltonbradley]

Re: Any Urban Exploration planned?

Thanks Melesse! I don't know how I missed that.

[noid]

Re: Any Urban Exploration planned?

At Sunday's 'Surviving Defcon' talk over at the Lodge fellow Lodge-mate and Vegas native Londo brought up the storm drain thing as well. Apparently a lot of it drains to underground aquifers, so if you do get swept away down there its highly likely that you wont even get a proper burial..

Keep it above ground and preferably, not at the Riv (I've been in the infrastructure there, you arent missing anything exciting).