S5E28: 4 Things You Need to Know about Desert Flooding

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Chris Clarke: This episode is made possible by listeners just like you, and by

[00:00:05] CMC Ad Voiceover: Copper Mountain College, a proud sponsor of this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

[00:00:12] Chris Clarke: Floods make the desert. That's counterintuitive. Aren't deserts places where there's no water? But it's true. Floods make the desert.

[00:00:23] Chris Clarke: They're part of the desert circulatory system. They are only disasters when people and infrastructure occupy the places that the floods want to go.

[00:00:43] Joe Geoffrey: Think the deserts are barren wastelands?

[00:00:49] Joe Geoffrey: Think again. It's time for 90 Miles From Needles, the desert protection podcast.

[00:01:03] Chris Clarke: Thank you, Joe. And welcome to 90 Miles from Needles. I'm your host Chris Clarke and we had an episode planned for this week that talked about a sneaky trick that developers and development-friendly government officials often use to sneak their destructive projects through environmental analysis. And we will still bring you that episode.

[00:01:28] Chris Clarke: It's more interesting than I just made it sound. But given the events of the last week including the horrendous absolutely mind-boggling disaster in Nepal and Tibet and the much smaller but nonetheless still extremely tragic flooding in the Grand Canyon, it really seemed inappropriate not to reflect on those events.

[00:01:54] Chris Clarke: And so we will talk about flash floods in the desert Southwest and hopefully you'll get something out of this episode that will keep you from being a future face on the news. Let's jump right into it.

[00:02:29] Chris Clarke: The first thing you need to know about the Grand Canyon floods is that it wasn't just the Grand Canyon that flooded. Yes, on August 29th, a monsoon storm parked itself over the Dragon Bravo fire scar on the canyon's north rim and sent water, mud, boulders, and debris down Bright Angel Creek, which is one of the most popular hiking corridors in Grand Canyon National Park.

[00:02:52] Chris Clarke: 82 people had to be evacuated. There were some folks that were camping on Bright Angel Creek that were killed. John Giusti and Brent Rosenkranz from Texas have both been identified by the Park Service after their remains were recovered. They were visiting Grand Canyon with their friend, Timothy Allen Smith, who remains missing as of my recording this.

[00:03:16] Chris Clarke: There might have been some day hikers around the creek that were caught up in the deluge and haven't been found yet. I hope that's not true. We'll probably never find out for sure. And the infrastructure took a hit. The North Kaibab Trail is closed, the Transcanyon Waterline is missing miles of itself, and bridges near Phantom Ranch at the bottom of Bright Angel Creek on the Colorado River washed away, and the timeline for repairs is unknown.

[00:03:44] Chris Clarke: Now, the Grand Canyon's a popular place. People more or less know where it is even if they've never been west of Iowa. I understand why it gets the attention. It's a startlingly beautiful landscape. But this was just one flood in an exceptionally active period of southwestern flooding, and it wasn't the only place where lives were lost to flooding this summer.

[00:04:08] Chris Clarke: On July 17th, five members of the Long family, Spencer, Katrina, Reid, Thayne, and Gage, were killed by a flash flood near Sunglow Campground outside Bicknell, Utah. It's worth noting that Spencer Long, the father of the family, was a Provo Fire Department captain who had extensive search-and-rescue experience.

[00:04:30] Chris Clarke: We'll talk about that a bit later. The good news, and there is good news, is that there were quite a few floods in July and August that didn't take any lives that we know of. Some did require some rescue work. There were 11 hikers in four distinct groups rescued at Bryce Canyon on August twenty-fourth.

[00:04:51] Chris Clarke: They were all of them on extremely popular hiking trails. A family was stranded overnight at Capitol Reef National Park August twenty-ninth and thirtieth, but they ultimately were able to get back to pavement once the flooding receded. In July at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, debris flows stranded 21 visitors, all of whom were rescued safely.

[00:05:17] Chris Clarke: Down into Mojave at Quartzsite, Arizona not far from the Colorado, two major highways, Interstate ten and State Route ninety-five flooded due to monsoon rains and damaged a number of businesses in Quartzsite. There was flooding below the Salt Fire Scar in Ruidoso, New Mexico which has had its share of problems in the last few years on July twentieth and August sixteenth.

[00:05:42] Chris Clarke: There was flooding across Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Our friend Morgan Sjogren, who's been on the podcast a couple of times, told me today that Escalante was, in her words, unrecognizable. Northeast of Phoenix, an eighty-eight-year-old man and his dog were stranded overnight August thirteenth and fourteenth.

[00:06:06] Chris Clarke: They were well prepared and levelheaded and well stocked up, and they were rescued the next day. Flooding didn't happen just out in the boondocks. On August twenty-ninth, Cottonwood Creek flooded Orangeville, Utah forcing evacuations from homes and apartments displacing around 100 people. A Tucson driver perhaps comically in retrospect got stranded on the roof of her Volkswagen after driving into deep water.

[00:06:35] Chris Clarke: What I'm saying is the Grand Canyon flood received national attention, but it wasn't an isolated disaster. It was one especially deadly part of a regional monsoon emergency. The second thing you need to know about the Grand Canyon floods is that this is how the desert works. Flash floods are not unusual in a desert.

[00:06:58] Chris Clarke: They're not aberrations. They're one of the principal forces that make desert landscapes. They helped excavate and continue to reshape the Grand Canyon. They are one of three forces that are responsible for most of the way the Grand Canyon looks. The others being incision by the Colorado River into the local terrain and millions of years of geological uplift.

[00:07:22] Chris Clarke: The sustained river incision and the geological uplift are the canvas. The flash floods are the brushstrokes. Flash floods are the reason that slot canyons exist. They're the reason that a lot of boulders are in strange places in the desert. Flash floods enlarge and shape and reroute washes. They redistribute sediment.

[00:07:46] Chris Clarke: They build alluvial fans. An alluvial fan is essentially a record of repeated floods emerging from a canyon and spreading rock and sediment across the floor of the valley outside the canyon mouth. Large rocks fall out of the flood as the water slows close to the canyon mouth. Sand and gravel travel farther.

[00:08:06] Chris Clarke: Silt generally goes all the way to the valley floor. Flash floods make those alluvial fans, and they rearrange them. Death Valley National Park has to rebuild or repair Badwater Road pretty frequently because the road crosses active washes and alluvial fans, some of which are picturesque enough to be used in geology textbooks as examples of alluvial fans.

[00:08:29] Chris Clarke: Since Badwater Road is right up against the boundary of the Death Valley wilderness, the National Park Service can't really pick it up and move it half a mile uphill. Of course, wilderness boundaries and property lines and park boundaries and roads and pipelines and campgrounds and utility corridors are human concepts.

[00:08:50] Chris Clarke: For the most part, they are where they are because it's convenient to us, not because it necessarily makes sense to have them where they are. But floodwaters don't pay attention to what's convenient for us. They follow the topography. And the Transcanyon Waterline, which we mentioned before, is the latest reminder that every piece of desert infrastructure has a finite half-life.

[00:09:14] Chris Clarke: These floods aren't random, but they're predictable. They're part of how the desert works. We can't predict exactly which wash will get flooded on which afternoon, but we can predict that washes will get flooded. Roads will be cut, bridges will be washed downstream, and infrastructure built in the way of flash floods will eventually be damaged or destroyed.

[00:09:36] Chris Clarke: The question isn't just whether hikers make good decisions. It's also whether our infrastructure and visitor management systems recognize the landscapes that they actually occupy. The third thing you need to know about the Grand Canyon floods is that blaming victims doesn't help anybody. Social media commentary after the Grand Canyon floods turned into negative judgment pretty quickly.

[00:10:03] Chris Clarke: Why were they there? Why didn't they check the forecast? Why didn't they turn around? Experienced people should have known better. And to that, I would remind you that the late Spencer Long, who very sadly died along with most of his family, had extensive search and rescue experience. Expertise reduces risk.

[00:10:25] Chris Clarke: It doesn't eliminate it. Flash floods can originate miles upstream under a storm that people downstream can't see. They can strike in unlikely places. I've been caught in a flash flood in my car in Twentynine Palms on a road that travels along the top of a ridge. How's that for an unlikely spot? My life probably wasn't in danger, but I definitely ran the risk of losing my vehicle, and I've been in the desert for a very long time.

[00:10:54] Chris Clarke: Forecasts are important. They describe probabilities though over broad areas, and they can't identify the exact drainage that's gonna flood or how rapidly conditions will change. Roads and trails that were safe on the way into the backcountry might be impassable on the way out. Sure, people do make mistakes during emergencies, but criticizing them with the benefit of hindsight misses the point.

[00:11:21] Chris Clarke: Victim blaming can actually make visitors less safe. It turns safety guidance into an intelligence test or a test of morals. Careful people survive, foolish people die. And that kind of logic encourages experienced travelers to think warnings are intended for somebody else, somebody less competent than they think they are.

[00:11:46] Chris Clarke: That kind of blaming makes people reluctant to report near misses or to admit that they aren't sure about whether it's safe to go. And it valorizes individual people's judgment and omits the necessity for better warnings and closures and permitting systems and land use decisions and emergency planning that take flash floods into account.

[00:12:08] Chris Clarke: We can examine what happened in floods like the one in Grand Canyon without putting the dead on trial. Now just because we're pointing out that floods are natural doesn't mean we're saying that deaths are unavoidable. The landscape is dangerous in certain conditions, sure, but human choices do shape the exposure, and they're not all individual choices.

[00:12:30] Chris Clarke: There are choices we can make on an institutional level that can help save lives.

[00:12:34] Joe Geoffrey: Don't go away. We'll be right back.

[00:12:37] CMC Ad Voiceover: Copper Mountain College is a proud sponsor of 90 Miles From Needles. Located in Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert, Copper Mountain College serves the communities of the high desert with a broad range of programs from desert studies and the popular Wildland Fire Academy to nursing, EMT, water technology, and many more programs.

[00:12:59] CMC Ad Voiceover: Copper Mountain College provides direct transfer programs to California State University and the University of California as well as career technical education. Learn more at cmccd.edu. Go Fighting Cacti!

[00:13:14] Chris Clarke: In this week's offering from Fred Bell, our nature sounds recordist friend, Fred writes, "Crickets and a poorwill fill this nighttime soundscape around the King's Pool at Point of Rocks inside Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge."

[00:14:44] Joe Geoffrey: You're listening to 90 Miles From Needles, the desert protection podcast. The desert's music is better than anything you can play through that dang Bluetooth speaker.

[00:14:56] Chris Clarke: The fourth thing you need to know about the Grand Canyon floods: we can learn how to reduce the risk both on the personal and on the institutional level.

[00:15:07] Chris Clarke: Yes, you should check weather across the entire watershed you're gonna be hiking in, including areas upstream that may be out of sight. If you don't know what's upstream, find out. Look at Google Maps and turn on the terrain view. Ask somebody that's been there before. Look at paper maps. Talk to the land management agencies.

[00:15:29] Chris Clarke: And it's good for you to familiarize yourself with the terminology. A flash flood watch and a flash flood warning are two different things. They don't mean the same thing. The analogy I like to use is tacos. This isn't original to me. I only steal really good ideas. Let's say you've been to the grocery store, you got the tortillas, you got the carne asada, you got cheese and a cheese grater.

[00:15:56] Chris Clarke: There are avocados on the counter that you're gonna use to make guacamole. You've got some jalapeños. Conditions are correct for there to be tacos at some point later, but there may never be a taco. That is a taco watch. A taco warning means there are tacos. Anyway, inform yourself, ask the rangers, ask the folks behind the desk at the visitor center or the tribal park office or county road departments, the U.S.

[00:16:30] Chris Clarke: Forest Service, the BLM. In some states, you can call the State Department of Transportation and ask about current conditions or look on their websites. Do not depend on an app to plan your route. When Apple Maps first came out, I was sure they were going to kill people because they directed people along roads that were questionably defined as roads to begin with that went off into the backcountry with no distinction between four-wheel drive routes and conventional passenger car routes.

[00:16:59] Chris Clarke: And Apple Maps has gotten a lot better, but it can still lead you right into trouble. Ask people who know. Ask people who have experience in the area you're visiting. And when storms are possible, avoid washes, especially avoid slot canyons where it's hard to climb to higher ground. Avoid driving on salt flats and clay roads.

[00:17:24] Chris Clarke: Don't take shortcuts. Turn around when conditions start looking questionable. Don't wait for actual danger. Most importantly, never drive or walk through moving floodwater. It only takes a couple inches to knock a person down and carry them downstream, and we're not talking about a water slide here. We're talking boulders moving at 10 miles an hour, talking logs floating along at the speed of the flash flood.[1] 

[00:17:53] Chris Clarke: Doesn't matter how well you swim. Don't walk into the moving floodwater, and it takes a surprisingly small amount of water to float most cars. So if you've gone somewhere and you wanna get back home and you can't because there's a flash flood in the way, stay on high ground or move to higher ground and wait.

[00:18:13] Chris Clarke: If you can stay with your vehicle, do that. The vehicle's much easier to find than you are. I mean, if your vehicle stalls out in a wash, get the heck out of it and walk uphill. If you're going on a trip where this kind of flooding is a possibility, make sure you've got extra water and food, more than you think you're gonna need.

[00:18:34] Chris Clarke: Make sure you have any medications that you need to take, and extra batteries or a power bank, an extra pair of underwear, blankets or sleeping bags. A lot of smartphones have satellite SOS capability. One of the things you learn really fast when you move to the desert is that cell phone coverage maps are aspirational at best.

[00:18:58] Chris Clarke: You can't count on reaching AAA, and if you do get through to AAA, a lotta times the towing bill will reach into the four figures. As soon as that tow truck gets off the pavement, the price goes up. Remember that 88-year-old man and his dog who waited out the flood and got rescued the next day? He already had set up his phone to be able to send satellite SOS messages.

[00:19:24] Chris Clarke: He also had a bunch of food, a bunch of water, and the medications he needed to take. I hope I'm as smart as that 88-year-old when I grow up. Carry paper maps. Like Joe Geoffrey said in a recent episode, they don't run out of power. Tell someone where you're going, what kind of vehicle you have, when you expect to get back, and how long they should wait before they send out the SOS.

[00:19:53] Chris Clarke: It should be somebody that will actually follow up, not a neighbor who might end up saying, "Come to think of it, I haven't seen him for about a week." A spouse or a parent or a sibling. Even better, talk to the local land management agency that's writing you your permit. Tell them where you wanna go. You want someone who has written down your timetable and will do something if you miss a date.

[00:20:21] Chris Clarke: Here's a big one, and it's really just an attitude shift. If you are stranded somewhere by flash flooding, treat delay as an inconvenience, not an emergency. No shift at the workplace, no doctor's appointment, no meeting with your publisher or your parole officer, no reunion with your family is more important than you sticking around on the planet to get there late.

[00:20:49] Chris Clarke: If the choice is between getting there late and maybe not getting there at all, take the first choice. Those are all personal measures. There are also political or regulatory measures that can be taken to protect people by default when they miss taking those personal steps. One of the biggest ones is closing slot canyons and canyon bottom roads and hiking areas that include those kinda places when flash flood warnings are issued.[2] 

[00:21:19] Chris Clarke: Zion National Park got hit by some strong monsoon storms in the last few days, and they had significant flash flooding on the Virgin River through the Narrows and in other watercourses and other slot canyons. And the Park Service has an official policy at Zion where if the National Weather Service issues a flash flood warning, they close places that are dangerous when flash floods happen.

[00:21:47] Chris Clarke: If people can't get to the slot canyon, people won't drown in the slot canyon. Another example, the Navajo Nation manages Antelope Canyon which is a beautiful spot. If you follow a bunch of Southwestern people on social media, you've probably seen a photograph of Antelope Canyon. It's a beautiful spot. I haven't been there yet.

[00:22:10] Chris Clarke: I need to go. And Antelope Canyon is a hideously dangerous place to be if a flash flood is possible. The Navajo Nation requires that people who wanna see Antelope Canyon go in with a certified guide who is licensed by the tribe, and that means that the tribe and other first responders have lists of who's in the canyon, and who's responsible for getting them out.

[00:22:37] Chris Clarke: In the last month, the National Weather Service put out a flash flood warning for Antelope Canyon and nearby slot canyons, and the phrase they used to express the level of danger was literally, "Get out of Antelope Canyon now." That kind of warning is crucial, and it's one more reason that the current gutting of the National Weather Service, and the crippling of its ability to forecast is absolutely criminal.

[00:23:04] Chris Clarke: The Havasupai Tribe manages Havasu Canyon. It's where they live. They control entry to the canyon. You need a permit to get in, and they will close the canyon or the entire reservation during flood season. People have died of flash floods in Havasu Canyon in recent memory, and closing the canyon is exactly the right thing to do.[3] 

[00:23:29] Chris Clarke: Other measures include requiring camps and commercial outfitters and organized outdoor programs to take weather radios on their trips. Gates and warning signs help, especially if they are connected in some way to upstream gauges that can tell before you enter the canyon that there's a flash flood coming into the top of that canyon.

[00:23:49] Chris Clarke: After a fire in the desert, we could require that authorities map potential flood areas and establish triggers for evacuation. Establish what is going to make them say, "Get out of this canyon now." We need to update floodplain maps and rainfall assumptions. Our dumping of CO2 into the atmosphere has changed the projections that FEMA still uses to calculate 100-year flood areas.[4] 

[00:24:15] Chris Clarke: Those need to be updated. We could use stronger land use rules to keep new buildings and infrastructure out of active flood paths. Floods make the desert. That's counterintuitive. Aren't deserts places where there's no water? But it's true, floods make the desert. They're part of the desert's circulatory system.

[00:24:37] Chris Clarke: They are only disasters when people and infrastructure occupy the places that the floods want to go, and when we pretend that personal preparation and individual competence are the best answers to the collision between the natural regime of the floods in a desert and where we choose to plunk ourselves.

[00:24:57] Chris Clarke: Now, there's a bonus thing you should know about the Grand Canyon floods, and in fact, this summer's monsoon season writ large. The floods in Utah and Arizona and New Mexico are not helping with the drought. They can help replenish local groundwater a little bit, but Lake Powell and Lake Mead and Elephant Butte Reservoir are lower now than they were a month ago.

[00:25:26] Chris Clarke: That also seems counterintuitive, but desert floods are violent 'cause the water is concentrated in one spot. The total volume isn't much compared to the size of the reservoirs we're talking about. Those reservoirs rely on abundant snows in the mountains, and weather that warms slowly and allows snowmelt to trickle down into the watercourses.

[00:25:47] Chris Clarke: And we're not getting that, and that's why the Colorado River is in trouble. I wish the flash floods helped, but they don't.

[00:26:34] Chris Clarke: Thanks again for listening. Couple of things to mention. One is that this show is, again, heading to El Paso and possibly to Big Bend in early November. There's the Chihuahuan Desert Symposium at the El Paso Zoo November fourth through sixth. Gonna be there paying attention, learning some things, but also hopefully pointing a microphone in people's faces and asking them dumb questions to which they will have smart answers.

[00:27:05] Chris Clarke: I will be driving, and so I will necessarily be going through Tucson and Las Cruces. Keep your ears peeled for more news on that. In addition, we also have some new information up on our nonprofit website, which is thedamn.org, T-H-E-D-A-M-N.org for the Desert Advocacy Media Network talking about our Fellowship for Desert Reporting.

[00:27:31] Chris Clarke: If you go to thedamn.org/fellowship, you will see a description of the program. You will also see a link to the application form. Please consider checking it out, and please consider filling out that form. We're very excited to start this program early next year, and I hope that it really turns out to make a difference in someone's life or at the very least give them an additional clip to put in their folder.

[00:28:00] Chris Clarke: Now, this week on September third, my father-in-law, Johnny Rozzell, came to the end of his life. This was not unexpected, and we are all quite sad, but we are also all quite relieved that he is no longer suffering. He was really fed up with dealing with the impact on his life and on his wellbeing of the Parkinson's that he contracted as a result of Agent Orange exposure in the Vietnam War.

[00:28:28] Chris Clarke: He was a remarkable man who, when he saw himself doing things wrong, admitted it to himself and worked to change the way he did things, and I find that intensely admirable. Gonna miss him. This episode is dedicated to him. I'll see you at the next watering hole.

[00:28:52] Joe Geoffrey: And that brings us to the end of this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast.

[00:29:01] Joe Geoffrey: You can find show notes for this episode along with links and background at ninetymilesfromneedles.com. We're also on social media. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Threads. Just search for 90 Miles from Needles. And if you'd like a more direct line, you can reach us on Signal at A90MFN.67.

[00:29:29] Joe Geoffrey: If you'd like to support the show, you can make a donation of whatever size and frequency feels right to you at ninetymilesfromneedles.com/donate. Listener support is what makes this podcast possible. Our voiceover is by Joe Geoffrey. Podcast artwork is by Martine Mancha. Nature sounds are recorded by Fred Bell.

[00:29:52] Joe Geoffrey: Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio with additional music licensed from independent artists.

[00:30:02] Chris Clarke: Other music in this episode is by AG Soundtracks and Joel Loopez.

[00:30:59] Joe Geoffrey: 90 Miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.