1 year after deadly floods, Globe's mayor says recovery has been 'amazing'

On Sept. 26, 2025, the small community of Globe, Arizona, was hit with a flash flood that no one saw coming.

The city of about 7,000 people was hit with more than 2 inches of rain in 24 hours. The waters flooded creeks and roads and washed through downtown businesses and homes. Three people died.

But, the city was denied funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and one year later the recovery is ongoing.

Al Gameros is the mayor of Globe. He joined The Show to talk about what the city looks like one year later.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, mayor. Thank you for coming back on The Show.

AL GAMEROS: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: So it’s been a year next week since these devastating floods hit your community. What are you thinking about this week as this anniversary approaches?

AL GAMEROS: You know, I guess what I’m thinking about is how far we’ve come since that time frame, really, from the very first day seeing the destruction that tore through our residential area and through our northern part of our downtown area, and really thinking, “How would we clean this mess up? How would we recover?” And really, it’s been amazing to see the amount of work done. The cleanup was amazing. The people that came in to help us in that, that was one major step there.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So talk about that, like, early days, the people who showed up to help clean up, to, you know, scoop mud and get rid of debris. It was thousands of people, right?

AL GAMEROS: There was, yes. Initially, again, I just want to make sure that we remember those that were lost in this flood. Initial 48 hours was recovery, rescue and recovery, making sure we didn’t have anybody else out there. Those were our priorities, and then opening up our main highways. And on Sunday, two days after the flood, we opened it up, and there was thousands of people that showed up downtown with shovels, rakes, whatever they had, a lot of local contractors with their dump trucks and loaders and started the cleanup from there.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So where are you now in terms of recovery, in terms of rebuilding? Are businesses still closed? Are they coming back?

AL GAMEROS: You know, I’ll have to say we are open. All the businesses that were open, except for one, are now open from before the flood. And we’re talking quite a bit of them. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars that they had to personally invest back into their business to open up.

You know, when you talk about FEMA funding, you talk about FEMA funding, it brings no funding to residents or business. That’s all for public infrastructure is what it is. And so it’s difficult. You have to reinvest. A lot of people took out small business loans that was activated with the state declaration.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Let’s talk about that federal funding, that FEMA declaration that you didn’t get, even on appeal. We had you on The Show some months ago to talk about that and just the massive economic impact that these floods had on Globe. What do you think that denial of federal funding has done to the recovery process?

AL GAMEROS: Well, I think it hasn’t slowed us down, but I have mixed feelings about the, you know, not being approved for the FEMA. We are working with the state very closely. They have been very good with us. We are working on 75% reimbursement, so we still have to put 25% out of our coffers in order to complete projects. But the FEMA declaration would have been huge for us, knocking our match to 10%.

You know, they denied us three days before the deadline that our final report was due in December of ’23. And we had initially about $36 million in damage that we had initially assessed. And with the final report, we turned in $96 million in damage just to our city. Again, this isn’t the county, that isn’t town of Miami, but just our city. And they still denied us and said that that didn’t rise to the magnitude or severity for a declaration.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. I mean, so the state, as you mentioned, has stepped in, included $10 million for flood recovery there in Globe and also in neighboring Miami. How far has that gotten you? You mentioned you’ve been able to reimburse people to a certain extent.

AL GAMEROS: Well, we were approved for an NRCS federal funding funds in the amount of $24 million about — it’s been 220 days, almost exactly. $3 million of that was to engineer. Our priority was our waterways and our creekways to build capacity in case we had another flood of this extent.

So $3 million was for engineering. To date, we have spent $10 million on clearing debris out of the creek, plus stabilizing some walls along the creek wall. The match for us is $2.5 million, and we were fortunate that the state and Gov. Hobbs allocated the $10 million to Gila County, so Globe received $2.5 million, so that covered the initial $10 million of Phase 1 and 2.

LAUREN GILGER: So let me ask you more about those retention walls, that kind of effort to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I mean, we’re under flash flood warnings, you know, yesterday in the state. I think there are probably more coming today. What are you concerned about? Do you think you’re ready?

AL GAMEROS: I think we are. You know, I’m very confident, very comfortable with what we with Tiffany Construction, who we hired, and the engineering that was done taking it down to to really historic levels. We’ve had a lot of buildup, and especially since the Telegraph Fire ’21, we’re getting more debris and water that flows through our creeks. We have 2.8 miles of creek that flows from our southern end of town and all the way to downtown.

So that’s the $10 million that we spent it on, just 2.8 miles. And we did stabilize some of the walls with rock, but our Phase 3 is going to be some roads that are still washed out that we’re going to have to do some rebar and shotcreting and then rebuild these roads again in the next eight months.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you in the last minute or so here, mayor, about the community. I mean, you mentioned you’re open for business, almost everybody has reopened there in the downtown area who was flooded out. Have people stayed? Have people left? Has this made the community there stronger?

AL GAMEROS: You know, I think it showed the resilience of our community and really wanting to reinvest in what we have here. Obviously, the sad part is we had, there was five homes that had to be torn down in our southern end, and those families had to relocate either in the community or out of the community. But as far as businesses, we are back open. Our recovery continues, and it will continue for years.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right, we’ll leave it there. Al Gameros, the mayor of Globe, Arizona, joining us. Thank you very much, mayor, for coming on. Appreciate it.

AL GAMEROS: Thank you.