Arizona Daily Star 1981

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The weather was calm and clear when Pima County Sheriff's Deputy Chuck McHugh got the call on Sunday, July 26, 1981: A young male had dived headfirst into a shallow pool at Tanque Verde Falls.

"We called DPS Air Rescue to respond and the Southern Arizona Rescue Association to respond from the ground," says McHugh, who was the Sheriff's Department coordinator for search and rescue operations.

"DPS had landed at the top of a fairly small waterfall and we were hiking probably a quarter-mile downstream," says McHugh. "I crossed that creek, about 15 feet across, in calf-deep water."

That's when the Department of Public Safety helicopter radioed down below: flash flood.

By the time McHugh looked up, the helicopter carrying John Evans, the fatally injured diver, was scrambling to lift off, seconds before a wall of water would come crashing down.

"It was a churning mass of brown, chocolaty water, with lots of debris mixed up in it," says McHugh.

Within seconds, the raging waters would sweep eight to their deaths, plunging the victims to the foot of Tanque Verde Falls, a drop of 80 feet.

It would take five days to recover all the bodies.

"What had happened was, some of the bodies were pinned underneath the current under the base of the main fall," says McHugh, who was there until the last body was recovered. "One young lady, her leg became pinned in a crevice."

The body of one victim, Michele Balser, 18, had to be lifted by litter 200 to 300 yards straight up to the roadway.

"We had to haul the litter out of that narrow canyon using a rope-pulley system," says then-Sheriff's Department Sgt. Larry Seligman, who would later become chief of police of the Pascua Yaqui Police Department. "I would be with the litter, keeping it steady and maneuvering it over rocks. It's backbreaking labor."

Some 26 others trapped on rocks by the swirling waters that Sunday were rescued by DPS helicopter.

Meanwhile, McHugh was working his way downstream along the canyon walls when he encountered an 18-year-old woman. "She was in water up to her waist and holding on to a tiny cottonwood sapling."

Salvation came with the arrival of a rescue helicopter from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, which lowered a flight surgeon dangling on a cable.

"He got a sling around her, got her attached and rescued her," says McHugh, who now works in Phoenix for the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs.

After the tragedy, McHugh and the others learned that a small, isolated cell had drifted above the headwaters of Tanque Verde Creek, dumping on those headwaters.

"You're always taking some degree of risk of a weather event occurring upstream from you," he says. "You have to be very alert."

But on that beautiful Sunday almost 27 years ago, "it would have been very, very difficult for those people to anticipate a flash flood," says McHugh. "It was a nice, bright, sunny day."