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Hourly Update

Grand Canyon evacuations continue

By Amanda Lee Myers
The Associated Press
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.18.2008
PHOENIX — Helicopters resumed evacuating tourists and residents Monday from the bottom of a canyon where heavy rains and a breached dam have caused flooding.
Authorities also searched for fewer than 20 campers and tourists who remained unaccounted for, said Gerry Blair, a spokesman for the Coconino County Sheriff’s Department. He said it’s possible those people might have already left but authorities would assume they were still in the canyon until that could be determined.
There were no reports of injuries.
About 170 people had been evacuated as of Sunday evening. Blair couldn’t say how many had been brought out as of Monday morning or how many would be brought out in all.
He said no one was being forced to leave the village of Supai, which is about 10 miles by trail from the bottom of the canyon, but that authorities would evacuate people who want to get out.
No more tourists were being allowed in, Blair said.
Tracey Kiest, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross, said there were 35 evacuees at a shelter in Peach Springs outside the canyon.
On Saturday afternoon, Mimi Mills and 15 other river runners were left stranded after a flash flood washed away their rafts while they were on a hike. They were rescued Sunday morning.
“It was definitely frightening, and there was a lot of, ’Whoa, what are we going to do next and what’s the morning going to bring?” Mills, 42, of Nevada City, Calif., told The Associated Press in a phone interview from the shelter Monday.
She said the group took shelter overnight under an overhang, but had to scramble up a cliff when another flash flood occurred in the middle of the night.
“I woke up to people yelling, ’We’ve got to get out of here!”’ she said. “We booked it up a cliff in 10 seconds, and we just saw this massive rush of water rage down the creek side.”
The area of northern Arizona got 3 to 6 inches of rain Friday and Saturday and about 2 inches more on Sunday, said Daryl Onton, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Flagstaff. Early Monday, about 0.80 of an inch more fell on the area, the weather service said.
“That’s all it took — just a few days of very heavy thunderstorms,” Onton said.
About 6 a.m. Sunday, the Redlands Earthen Dam about 45 miles upstream from the Havasupai village of Supai was breached, park officials said. The dam isn’t a “huge, significant” structure and its rupture was only one factor in the flooding, said Blair.
Rescuers worked throughout Sunday to locate campers and Supai Village residents and evacuate them to the top of the canyon. About 400 Havasupai tribe members live in the village.
Dozens of people spent the night at an American Red Cross evacuation center set up in the Hualapai Tribal Gymnasium in Peach Springs.
Many residents and campers chose to stay in Supai, Blair said.
Some hiking trails and footbridges were washed out and trees were uprooted, according to park officials and the weather service.
Supai is about 75 miles west of Grand Canyon Village, the popular gateway to Grand Canyon National Park.
In 2001, flooding near Supai swept a 2-year-old boy and his parents to their deaths while they were hiking.
Associated Press Writer Mark Carlson contributed to this report.
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