Flash floods force evacuations across the Southwest as Colorado hot-springs town braces for record river crest

The San Juan River was forecast to crest above 20 feet late Sunday night in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, a town of just over 2,000 people, prompting warnings of "catastrophic flooding" and evacuations across the Southwest. The sheriff's office in Archuleta County noted the river reached roughly 17.8 feet in the 1911 flood that wiped out most of the town as it then existed. By sundown the crest had reached about 14 feet, according to a county spokesperson, and roads in and out were closed.

The flooding is the product of a series of Pacific storm systems that forecasters said could drop as much as four inches of rain across the region through Monday. A National Weather Service meteorologist in Tucson described the volume plainly: "We are getting two or three months of rain in a span of a couple of days." Flood warnings covered nearly all of Arizona, parts of southern Utah, southwestern Colorado, western New Mexico and part of southern Nevada.

The geography of the affected towns does the rest of the explaining. Sedona sits in a canyon, and officials ordered residents near Oak Creek to leave immediately as floodwaters trapped people in their homes. Gisela, a community of several hundred people along Tonto Creek more than 100 miles southeast, was evacuated entirely by order of Gila County. In Flagstaff, rain fell nearly nonstop, overwhelming storm drains, and authorities searched for a man who slipped into fast-moving floodwater and was not seen resurfacing.

Where the water had nowhere to go, it went inside. In the Pinetop-Lakeside area, manhole covers popped up and sewage backed up into homes, according to the regional sanitary district. Outside a church in Flagstaff, volunteers filled plastic bags with sand to keep water out of the building — into the garage, the basement and an office with computers in it, one man described. "The pumps are pumping, but they're not pumping fast enough," he said.

The Salt Lake City weather office warned that earlier storms had already saturated places like Zion and Capitol Reef National Parks, and that backcountry roads would likely become impassable. Pagosa Springs, a hot-springs town that lives off ski visitors, spent the night measuring its river against a flood from 1911 that erased most of what the town then was.