‘Devastating’ Damage as Hard Rains and Flash Floods Batter the Southwest

Torrential rains brought a new round of flooding to the Southwest on Monday, washing away roads and prompting fresh evacuations and anguish in a region still reeling from floods a week earlier. The damage sprawled across the high desert and mountains of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, a vast area where some towns received twice as much rain in a single day as they typically get during the entire month of November. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Shawn Koss, whose house along the Animas River in Flora Vista, N.M., flooded.

“The roads are cut in half. Gas stations look like a lake. It’s devastating.” Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona declared a statewide emergency in response to the floods on Monday. Other officials in the Four Corners region, where much of the worst flooding occurred, said they had not even begun to grapple with the extent of the damage. Many communities were still under evacuation orders or cut off altogether by landslides and damaged roads, and local police were struggling to navigate roads clogged by boulders and three feet of mud.

“We’re so cut off from some of those places,” said Brice Current, the police chief in Durango, Colo., where emergency workers rescued people from flooded neighborhoods and trailer parks. “It’s underwater and impassible.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

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