It didn’t take a miracle to revive a 13-year-old effort to arm the Grand Canyon’s Havasupai Indian Reservation with a warning system to announce flash floods—just a disaster.
An August flood that caused more than 450 people to be airlifted from the village of Supai and a nearby campground at the bottom of the canyon spurred the renewed interest in installing a system of stream-flow gauges and transmission devices, according to an Associated Press article published last week in the Tucson Citizen. No one was hurt by the flood, which washed through an area popular with tourists, according to the report.
The stalled system was designed in the 1990s to allow the National Weather Service to provide better estimates of when the remote village—accessible only by mule, foot, and helicopter—would be affected by flooding. Arizona plans to help link tribes such as the Havasupai to statewide flood warning network, but the timeframe for doing so is unknown, Arizona Flood Warning Coordinator Cassandra Anderson told the AP.
That could be soon, according to a New York Times article that stated Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano backed a state plan to install the $100,000 system proposed by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1995. The system wasn’t installed because of lack of funding, according to the article.
Jolie Breeden is the lead editor and science communicator for Natural Hazards Center publications. She writes and edits for Research Counts; the Quick Response, Mitigation Matters, Public Health, and Weather Ready Research Award report series; as well as for special projects and publications. Breeden graduated summa cum laude from the University of Colorado Boulder with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.