The Phoenix Flood of 2014

Early Monday morning, September 8th, the Phoenix Metro area was hit by record-breaking rainfall, with more than three inches falling (five inches in some areas; that's over half our usual annual rainfall) over the course of just a few hours.  Flooding, road closures, and stranded vehicles were widespread. The photo above, from Channel 15's local news report, is a few miles from our house, and shows the underpass where I usually get on or off the freeway. Other underpasses also flooded, and flooding on the I-17 freeway itself brought traffic to a standstill there for several hours.

I was at work when the heavy rain started about 3:00 AM. (There'd been a few brief showers earlier that morning and the previous evening.) That's about the time buildings and gates have to start being unlocked for employee access to the sports-equipment manufacturing site where I do security work, so I and the other security officer on duty had to go out into the very worst of it. We had umbrellas and slickers available, but got thoroughly drenched anyway.

Opening one of the parking lot gates, I had to splash around in about six inches of fast-running water, evoking memories of family vacations in the Sedona area as a kid, and wading around in Oak Creek. (I was very glad it was a relatively warm summer rain, and not a nasty, icky, cold winter rain.)

Quite a few employees were anywhere from a few minutes to an hour late getting to work that morning.

The rain had started to slack off by the time my shift ended a few hours later, but my fingertips were so prunified and wrinkled by then I had to spend several minutes drying and rubbing them before the time-clock's fingerprint-reader would recognize me. By then, the (flooded) freeway underpass I go through on the way home had recovered enough to have one lane available to traffic on one side; fortunately it was the side I needed. I stuck to streets' higher middle lanes driving home; most of the curbside lanes held several inches of water.

The downpour had been heavy enough the top inches of a lot of desert landscaping washed off yards, across sidewalks and into streets, leaving heavy deposits of dirt and gravel on the asphalt after the water had mostly drained away.

Shallow temporary lakes still remain in a lot of parking lots and other areas..  Many retention basins, meant to cache excess water during rainstorms, are full, so there's concern another storm in the next few days might cause them to overflow and produce even more flooding.

Our own house got through the storm fine; it's on a fairly elevated lot.  The back porch tends to get an inch or so of water built up during an actual storm, but it drains away pretty quickly after any rain stops.

I think this storm goes on the list with the ones from 1995 (80 mph winds, with gusts up to 115; we were the only house on our block that didn't require roof repairs, but had to replace the blown-over wooden fence with a stronger block fence) and 2010 (heavy hail that caused about a gazillion dollars of damage to roofs, windows and vehicles over much of the Phoenix area; we did end up with a new roof after that one).