This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

An Arizona sheriff’s office said on Sunday at least nine people had died in flash flooding and others were missing after a wall of water swept through a popular swimming hole inside Tonto National Forest.

Gila County sheriff J Adam Shepherd said crews were still searching the missing people. Earlier, Water Wheel fire and medical district fire chief Ron Sattelmaier fire chief said at least four people were dead and about a dozen more missing.

Sattelmaier said more than a hundred people were in the Cold Springs swimming hole on Saturday afternoon when a severe thunderstorm pounded down on a nearby remote area that had been burned over by a recent wildfire.

A woman who was hiking to the swimming hole said she saw people clinging to trees after the water rushed down a normally calm creek near the trail.

Three bodies were recovered on Saturday and another was found on Sunday morning, Sattelmaier said. The deaths include at least one child. Four people rescued by helicopter on Saturday were taken to the hospital for hypothermia. About a dozen other people remain unaccounted for.



“There’s no way of knowing how many people were actually there,” Sattelmaier said. “It’s pretty much recovery [now]. We don’t believe there’s anybody left out there.”

The thunderstorm hit about eight miles upstream of the swimming hole along Ellison Creek. That quickly flooded the narrow canyon where the swimmers were enjoying a cool dip a on a hot summer day.

“They had no warning. They heard a roar and it was on top of them,” Sattelmaier said.

There had been thunderstorms throughout the area near Payson, about an hour and half’s drive from Phoenix, but it was not raining where the swimmers were. It happened during monsoon season, when whether like this can strike furiously.

“I wish there was a way from keeping people from getting in there during monsoon season,” Sattelmaier said. “It happens every year. We’ve just been lucky something like this hasn’t been this tragic.”

Video shot by Disa Alexander shot shortly after the flood showed a man in a tree holding his baby as water rushed around him. His wife was a short way away, also clinging to a tree. Alexander said there was no warning before the wall of water hit.

“We were kinda looking at the water; it was really brown,” she said. “Literally 20 seconds later you just see, like hundreds of gallons of water smacking down and debris and trees getting pulled in. It looked like a really big mudslide.”

The flooding came after a severe thunderstorm pounded down on a nearby remote area that had been burned by a recent wildfire, Sattelmaier said.

The “burn scar” was one of the reasons the weather service issued the flash flood warning.

“If it’s an intense burn, it creates a glaze on the surface that just repels water,” said Darren McCollum, a meteorologist. “We had some concerns. We got a lot worse news.”