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Arizona got a rare taste of tornado season this week, and one small mountain community is now picking up the pieces.
A suspected tornado tore through Heber-Overgaard around 7 p.m. local time Wednesday (October 21), knocking down power poles, toppling trees, and damaging homes, according to Arizona’s Family. The Navajo County Sheriff’s Office reported significant damage and minor injuries, and a reception center opened at the Navajo County Heber Complex for people forced from their homes, ABC15 reported.
Heber resident Betty Nixon said the violent winds lasted less than a minute. “I got on the floor with the dogs and just was worried that the windows were gonna shatter. It sounded like a tornado,” she told Arizona’s Family. State Rep. Walt Blackman posted to X that he’s asking the governor to declare a state of emergency for the area. Officials are still calling it a possible tornado while crews assess the damage.
The storm capped a history-making day. The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) put northern and central Arizona under a tornado watch Wednesday, the state’s first since 2010, The Weather Network reported. Parts of central Arizona also sat under a Level 3 out of 5 severe weather risk, something that hadn’t happened in October since NOAA moved to its five-level scale in 2015, according to the FOX Forecast Center. ABC15 counted 11 tornado warnings across the state by the end of the day.
Downtown Flagstaff was pelted with golf ball-sized hail, and the Flagstaff Airport clocked a 72 mph gust, The Weather Channel reported. Farther north, the Moenkopi Wash near Tuba City climbed above 32 feet Wednesday evening, beating its previous record by nearly three feet, according to Fox Weather.
Eastern Arizona took a beating, too. In the historic mining town of Clifton, floodwaters and rockslides buried cars and damaged homes and roads Tuesday night, Arizona’s Family reported in a separate story. Crews there are filling sandbags ahead of more storms, and the area is under a flood watch until 10 p.m. Thursday.
The threat isn’t over yet. About 7 million people across the Four Corners and California were under flood watches Thursday (October 22), according to The Weather Channel. A Level 2 out of 4 flash flood risk covers parts of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, with a higher Level 3 threat near the Ferris Fire burn scar in southeastern Colorado, where three to five inches of rain is possible, Fox Weather said.
Severe storms could fire up again, too. A Level 2 out of 5 risk stretches across central and eastern Arizona, including Phoenix, and into western New Mexico, with damaging winds and hail as the main threats. Meanwhile, the higher elevations of the Sierra and the Rockies could see their first significant snow of the season.