Controlling the floodplain of the Agua Fria River


Even though Phoenix is in the desert, to really understand it you have to follow the water. And I don't mean lack of it, I mean too much of it. That is, flooding.

If you don't live in Phoenix, or if you're new to Phoenix, it may seem strange that a desert city would be in a constant battle with flooding. But it's been the story of Phoenix since the 1860s, and it continues to this day. Let's take a look at the Agua Fria River.

As of this writing (January of 2017) there is no flood control on the Agua Fria River. Other rivers in the Phoenix area, such as the Salt River, and the Verde, have been controlled for a long time. Washes that periodically did catastrophic flood damage to Phoenix have been controlled, such as Cave Creek. The Arizona Canal has a Diversion Channel next to it that protects the city of Phoenix all of the way to Peoria from flooding that would be caused by an overflow of the Canal (the water flows south). And there are a LOT of other flood control projects that have been created by the Maricopa County Flood Control District, which began in the 1950s. But not the Agua Fria.

Take a look at a map of the west valley. The Agua Fria River (which is actually a riparian wash, which means that's usually dry) flows parallel to the 101, going north to south. If you take a look at the 1964 map at the top of this post, you can see that it flows between El Mirage and Sun City. And if you're wondering if the engineers have controlled the Agua Fria, the answer is no.

It's been a very long time since a catastrophic flood hit that part of the valley. When it did, in the 1930s, the Agua Fria Project was wiped out, and the land sat mostly empty until an Air Force Base was built there in the 1940s (Luke Air Force Base, which is along the Agua Fria Floodplain at about Northern Avenue).

The project to control the Agua Fria River will be the next gigantic engineering project in the Phoenix area, and so far I've never heard anyone even talking about it. I sometimes wonder if I'll live long enough to see it? But once it's done, it will be like all of the other flood control projects in the valley, it will work so well that no one will really ever have to think about it again, and people will say, "there used to be flooding there?"


Cave Creek flooding in 1921


Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please go to patreon.com/PhoenixHistoryAdventuring where you can show your support for as little as $1 a month. Thank you!

What Patreon is http://bradhallart.blogspot.com/2016/03/supporting-creators-on-web-with-patreon.html

Comments

  1. UnknownJune 30, 2021 at 11:44 AM

    Brad,

    There was a flood in 1980 caused by heavy rain between Feb 13-20 which led to the eventual release from Lake Pleasant dam. The San Diego Padres used train in the spring in Sun City. They had facilities built in the dry river bottom. I think you know what happened next.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more