Gov. Katie Hobbs put Arizona under a statewide emergency on Monday, Nov. 2, after a weekend of flash flooding that reached from the high country to the desert floor. Flagstaff, the mountain city at the center of the storm, had collected 5.15 inches of rain over two days, and Nov. 1 alone set a daily record for the date.
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One man died after falling into floodwater that surged into a Flagstaff drainage tunnel, and a second man was found dead in a drainage area in the city.
Hobbs and the statewide order that followed county emergencies
The Associated Press reported that Hobbs issued the statewide emergency declaration on Monday, after emergencies had already been declared for Navajo and Coconino counties. The same wire story describes Flagstaff as having logged its wettest Nov. 1 on record, with 5.15 inches falling across Nov. 1 and Nov. 2. Moving from county paperwork to a single order for the whole state puts every Arizona community under one umbrella while the cleanup is still being scoped.
The AP account does not list a dollar figure or a set of agencies attached to Monday’s order, so the practical reach of the declaration is still unspecified. Past Arizona orders give a sense of the usual contents. Last October, Hobbs declared an emergency for Gila and Maricopa counties after storms fed by Hurricane Priscilla and Tropical Storm Raymond, and the governor’s office said that order released $200,000 from the Governor’s Emergency Fund and told the Arizona Department of Transportation to ask the Federal Highway Administration for help repairing damaged roads. Whether Monday’s order follows the same template has not been stated publicly.
Flagstaff’s 5.15 inches and the Workman Creek gauge
Flagstaff sits at roughly 7,000 feet beneath the San Francisco Peaks, a setting where a storm that stalls over the terrain can wring out far more water than the same system would deliver over open desert. The 5.15 inches fell in about 48 hours. At Workman Creek, a gauge the AP placed near Phoenix, the two-day total reached 7.3 inches, the highest figure in the wire report for Arizona.
The AP identified the first victim as Williams Singavarapu, 73, of New York, who died after falling into floodwaters rushing into a drainage tunnel in Flagstaff. The second man was found in a drainage area in the same city, and police suspect that death was weather-related as well. The wire report, filed on Nov. 2, gave no further detail on either case, and officials had not announced a cause beyond the flooding itself.
Jonathan Erdman, a senior meteorologist at weather.com, wrote in a recap published Nov. 3 that parts of Arizona and Colorado took 5 to 7 inches in a single day, more than double the average for the entire month of November. He also reported that fifteen river gauges in the three states had crested higher than at any point in their records, and that an atmospheric river carrying record levels of moisture for the time of year supplied the water.
Sedona, Camp Verde and Tucson felt it too
Flagstaff was not alone. In Sedona, floodwater trapped residents and washed out part of a highway. In Camp Verde, Doug Michaels evacuated an RV park as the water rose around it, and in Tucson, crews carried out swift-water rescues. The AP also reported that Pacific warming and El Niño sit behind the broader pattern, so the Arizona damage belongs to a regional run of storms rather than one isolated cell.
Across the border region the picture was similar. Reporting from NPR’s Ava Berger two weeks earlier described Navajo Nation police rescuing seven families, 30 people, from flooded homes during the first round of Four Corners flooding that began Oct. 21. The Hopi Tribe in northeastern Arizona had declared its own state of emergency on Thursday, Oct. 22, so the weekend’s rain arrived on ground and communities that were already soaked and stretched.
The El Niño backdrop and the road to federal help
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, told NPR the storms drew on moisture from record-warm Pacific water off the West Coast, a strong El Niño and a marine heat wave, according to a report republished by WLRN. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, in its ENSO diagnostic discussion, says the current El Niño is strengthening and gives better than an 83% chance of a strong-to-very-strong event through January-March 2027.
That does not mean every wet weekend traces to El Niño, and the center says plainly that impacts are more likely in a strong event but not guaranteed. Still, the typical pattern is a wetter southern tier of the country, and weather.com’s Erdman expects the soon-to-be record-strength event to keep that door open through the winter.
The governors of New Mexico and Colorado have asked President Donald Trump for a major disaster declaration to unlock federal money, according to the AP. The wire story reports no matching request from Arizona as of Nov. 2, and whether Hobbs will seek one once damage assessments are finished remains the open question for the state’s flooded communities.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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