How Homeless People Eat, Sleep & Survive in Flood Tunnels Under Las Vegas | Full Documentary

There is a tunnel entrance in Las Vegas not far from the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign.

You have seen that sign. Tens of thousands of people photograph it every year, standing in the median with the desert light behind them. Almost nobody notices the concrete opening in a wash nearby — four feet high, square, going into the dark.

Walk into it with a torch, and about two hundred feet in, the light from the entrance stops meaning anything at all.

It is around fifty degrees. It smells of damp concrete and dust. And somewhere ahead of you there is a mattress on a pallet, a shelf made of milk crates, a few tins of food arranged with real care, and a man who has been down there long enough to know exactly which sections flood first and how many seconds he would have.

Above him — thirty or forty feet of desert, roadbed and concrete — is one of the most photographed streets on earth.

The journalist Matthew O'Brien, who spent four years exploring those tunnels, put the whole thing into one sentence. It is the contrast, he said. The gambling cathedrals of the Strip, and then right down here you have people living on a cardboard mat in this black and grey underworld.

There are more than three hundred miles of flood channels under the Las Vegas valley.

And hundreds of people live in them.

This is a documentary about exactly how.