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Valley Still Recovering From Saturday's Strong Storm

A downed tree branch on Flower Street and Randolph Road Sunday.
(Photo by Al Macias-KJZZ)
A downed tree branch on Flower Street and Randolph Road Sunday.

Phoenix and the Valley continue to mop up following another strong storm that hit over the weekend. The fast-moving winds created more problems than the water.

The National Weather Service said more than a 1.5 inches of rain fell in parts of the Valley during Saturday’s storm. Wind speeds were clocked at 66 miles per hour in some spots and that toppled power lines.

"Um, this was a pretty big one," said Arizona Public Service spokesman Steven Gotfried. He said 50,000 APS customers lost power Saturday and now only a few hundred homes in central Phoenix will remain without lights until crews can get to them.

"There really isn’t a time frame because there is so much damage," Gotfried said. "There’s so much equipment and so much wire on the ground that it’s just going to take some time for us to get it all clear."

He said APS power lines that were blown over on 59 th Avenue and Greenway are being removed from the road and traffic will be allowed to flow again soon. Meanwhile, classes were canceled Monday for more than 300 students at Arthur M. Hamilton elementary school near 20 th Avenue and Durango Street in Phoenix because the power was out. District Superintendent Lenora Jenkins said an observant security guard notified the school’s food services director that edibles in the cafeteria might spoil.

“And so she assembled a team of her staff to go to Hamilton School and those items were transported to another site for storage,” Jenkins said.

Electricity is now back on at Hamilton and classes resume Tuesday. The recent series of strong rain storms has kept officials in Tempe on their toes. The construction of a new dam on Tempe’s Town Lake has been on and off again the past month or so. Tempe Spokeswoman Kris Baxter-Ging said flood waters flowed over the top of the old dam into the path where the new dam will go.

“And what that means is that while the water is flowing over we simply cannot do construction work," Baxter-Ging said.

But she said the project is still on schedule for completion by December of 2015. Forecasters are watching another tropical storm brewing off the west coast of Mexico, but they are uncertain whether it will bring more rain to Arizona. 

 

 

Steve Shadley was a reporter at KJZZ from 1990 to 1996 and from 2012 to 2015.