Seven Weather Offices Post Flood Watches on the I-10 Lane Into Phoenix

Seven National Weather Service offices from the Texas Hill Country to central Arizona had flood watches in effect on Thursday, October 29, nearly all of them running through Friday evening. The Phoenix office issued its watch at 1:05 a.m. MST and named Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, Central Phoenix, Deer Valley, Cave Creek and New River, Rio Verde and the Salt River, Fountain Hills and East Mesa among the covered zones. The forecast there calls for localized rainfall of one to two inches on Friday, with any strong thunderstorm capable of rates as high as one to two inches per hour.

The driver is an upper level storm system pulling deep moisture across the Southwest. The Midland and Odessa office put 1 to 3 inches, with locally higher totals, over West Texas and southeast New Mexico through Friday afternoon, including Midland, Ector, Ward, Winkler, Pecos and Reeves counties and the zone its forecasters call the Van Horn and Highway 54 corridor. Lubbock has 24 counties under a watch from Thursday afternoon through Friday evening. The Flagstaff office expects a general 0.50 to 1.00 inch across Yavapai County and northern Gila County between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. Friday, with up to 2.00 inches in thunderstorms, and it flagged the reason that matters more than the totals: the rain lands on saturated soils and on waterways that flooded as recently as last week.

The transport angle

Read those zones as a road map and they trace the southern transcontinental lane. I-20 through Midland and Odessa and I-10 through Van Horn are the two roads that carry cars out of Texas toward Tucson and Phoenix, and late October is when that lane is at its tightest. Snowbird cars are moving west and south now, and the first consignments bound for Arizona auction week in January start staging in the Valley around this time. The Dallas to Scottsdale corridor and the Chicago to Phoenix run both funnel through weather that is under a watch on Friday.

Desert flash flooding is a schedule problem before it is a damage problem. An enclosed trailer keeps water off paint and glass, but a flooded dip stops a 75-foot rig the same as it stops anything else, and the detour around a closed wash crossing in the north Valley can add an hour to a delivery that was already the last of the day.

The sharper risk is the last 200 feet. North Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Cave Creek, Rio Verde and Fountain Hills are full of residential streets that cross washes at grade with no culvert under them. A car with four inches of ground clearance cannot be driven through standing water of unknown depth to reach a trailer, which means loading has to happen on dry, level ground or not at all. Arizona also prices the alternative: under state statute 28-910, a driver who goes around a barricade into a flooded roadway is liable for the cost of the emergency response, capped at $2,000 per incident. No driver in a reputable enclosed network is going to take that bet with a client's car on the deck, and you should not want one who would.

What to do about it

If you have a Friday pickup or delivery anywhere in the Phoenix metro, call the broker today and ask two things: what the driver's actual window is, and what the dry alternate loading point is. A flat commercial lot on a main road beats a cul-de-sac that dips through a wash, and agreeing on it now is faster than negotiating it with a driver who is sitting at a barricade.

For anything under roughly five inches of clearance, ask whether the assigned trailer has a liftgate rather than ramps. A liftgate loads from level ground, which removes the approach angle problem and the puddle problem at once. The liftgate versus ramp loading guide covers what to ask for.

If the car is not time-critical, move the appointment to Saturday or Sunday. The watches expire Friday evening and the Valley drains quickly once the rain stops. Owners shipping on the seasonal calendar have room to slide a date, and the snowbird transport guide explains how much slack to build into a winter booking. If the origin or destination street is the problem rather than the weather, a terminal handoff solves it; the tradeoffs are in the door-to-door versus terminal guide.

Photograph the car before it goes on the trailer, in daylight, including the wheels and the underside of the front bumper. Condition documentation is the cheapest insurance there is, and a wet week is exactly when it earns its keep.