"I don’t know if that’s something we would be able to figure out," said the Las Vegas Convention & Visitor Authority’s Jeremy Handel. "It’s difficult to determine a specific economic impact Friday’s fire may have had. We commend the firefighters for their efforts in keeping everyone safe and the highway workers for getting the highway back open as soon as possible. Southern California is an important market for Las Vegas visitation, and we work closely with both the Nevada Department of Transportation and CalTrans to make our visitors aware of any issues that may impact their travels along I-15."
Applied Analysis economist Jeremy Aguero was similarly reluctant to make financial projections beyond saying that they would be "substantial": that there are 350,000 people (of various provenance) on the Strip every weekend, spending an average of $650 per person. One in three of those people is from California (13,571,749 last year, to be precise), 60 percent of whom have driven to Las Vegas. By our seat-of-the-pants month, we put that at 70,000. If you subtracted all their weekend spending, at $650 a head, that would be a $45.5 million blow to the local economy – bigger, obviously, on something like Super Bowl weekend.
RGC Economics principal John Restrepo dissents from our analysis somewhat, prefacing his remarks by saying that he hasn’t seen a calamity like the Bakersfield fire in 25 years here. "Are people going to have second thoughts about driving to Las Vegas," he asks. "I don’t think so. I guess we’ll see the impact – maybe a little blip 00 when the release the gaming and visiting numbers next month."
