Hurricane Nora Swamps Arizona Expected To Tone Down As It Moves North Up Colorado River Valley

The remnants of Hurricane Nora blew through southwestern Arizona in a hurry Thursday, flooding some roads but failing to live up to warnings that prompted residents to lay down tens of thousands of sandbags.

Water covered portions of U.S. 95 between Yuma and Quartzite, 80 miles to the north, forcing officials to close the section Thursday afternoon.

Nora was still at tropical storm strength when its center passed over Yuma, where 2.3 inches of rain had fallen by midafternoon and the strongest wind gust was 54 mph. Between 1.5 and 3.5 inches of rain fell elsewhere in southwestern Arizona, the National Weather Service said.

Nora’s center continued moving north Thursday up the Colorado River Valley, and it was expected to weaken to a tropical depression Thursday evening when its sustained winds dropped below 39 mph.

“We can breathe a sigh of relief,” Yuma County Sheriff Ralph Ogden said after the storm had passed.

Authorities had ordered more than 100 people to leave a low-lying area of Somerton, about 14 miles south of Yuma, said American Red Cross spokeswoman Carol Miller. About 50 people remained in a shelter in a Somerton school Thursday afternoon, she said.

In Yuma, a city of 60,000 directly in the storm’s path, authorities gave out more than 300,000 sandbags to residents who waited in lines up to 30 vehicles long. Yuma gets 3.6 inches of rain in an average year, and forecasters had said Nora alone could dump that much.

But the rain and wind were intermittent as the storm passed overhead shortly after noon, stopping at times before resuming as another arm of the storm moved in.

The storm knocked over seven power poles, cutting power to about 10,000 customers in Yuma, authorities said. Authorities closed 25 roads in the county because of flooding.

In Puerto Penasco, Mexico, a Gulf of California port about 120 miles southeast of Yuma, high winds downed power lines, ripped away signposts and sent sheet metal flying from houses. About 170 families sought refuge from the storm in a technical high school.

Farmers, however, were worried about the storm’s effect on cotton and vegetable crops grown on irrigated land in the area. Farms in the Yuma area and in the nearby Imperial Valley in California supply much of the vegetables for the United States during the winter. Agriculture officials said damage from the storm could drive up prices for lettuce and vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower nationwide.

“Most farmers like rain. But we don’t like rain. We are not geared for rain. It always hurts,” said Bonnie Stuhr, who along with her husband, Wayne, farms alfalfa, cotton and okra outside Wellton.

East of Yuma, the Tohono O’odham Nation declared an emergency and evacuated about 300 residents from five towns. Some of the Indian tribe’s members live in traditional adobe homes, which are particularly vulnerable to flooding. The reservation got up to three inches of rain by Thursday afternoon.

The Tohono O’odham reservation is already soaked from summer monsoon rains.

In California, Nora’s outer reaches gave Los Angeles its first rainfall in a record 219 days. Waves up to 20 feet hit a portion of the Orange County coast at high tide Thursday morning, causing local flooding. The storm dumped more than two inches of rain on Twentynine Palms and over 1.5 inches on Palm Springs.

The storm caused leaky roofs and some minor flooding in El Centro, and 15 wooden telephone poles toppled near Seely. Microsoft founder Bill Gates canceled plans for a party for 6,000 employees at Fiesta Island in San Diego because of the rain.

Firefighters used a kayak to deliver sandbags to beach homes swamped by the high waves and called in bulldozers to build sand berms and cut channels to allow the water to flow back into the ocean.

“Some of the reports we’ve had by our firefighters on scene is that they cannot see any of the beach, that it’s strictly water,” said spokesman Dennis Shell of the Orange County Fire Department.