i'll be interested in hearing the full response. my concerns are these. when you cut a major metropolitan area from its supply lines by land and air, it's going to cause a lot of disruption in the short term. you say residents (and presumably tourists) will have to make sure they get food themselves. from where? there's a huge difference in capacity of llamas vs trucks, and helicopters vs. cargo jets. so people are going to starve unless the military/fema is doing food drops or something.

fun fact: mccellan international airport is the third busiest in the US.

this capacity bottleneck extends not only to food but tourists themselves. Even if the high rollers can still get up to the strip, the total number of visitors would have to drop significantly, leaving most hotel rooms empty, most seats in shows empty, etc. the tourist economy (most of it at least) would collapse. maybe a few hotels would be able to survive, but most would go under. roads and airports can be rebuilt of course, but that usually takes years, and it's unlikely the tourist industry as we know it in vegas would survive that long.

so i think it's a little unrealistic to think that an increase in the novelty/sensationalist factor would stimulate tourism enough to compensate for the destruction of air and land transportation. tourists might be interested in visiting, but they won't be able to actually get there in the numbers needed for the tourist economy to survive. so - this is a major economic disaster in addition to being a humanitarian one (the flooding).

is there a specific plot-related reason for destroying the roads and the airport?