Flooding triggers state of emergency following historic Prescott rainfall

The rain, flooding, and evacuations in the high country, rivers, streams, and creeks overflowing tonight after three days of rain. Some areas of Sedona, Camp Verde, Tonto Basin, and the White Mountain Apache Reservation are evacuated tonight. So are parts of Prescott, and Mayor Kathy Rusing joins us live with the latest. Mayor, thanks for your time tonight. What's the situation up there? Thank you, Brian. We're broadcasting live from the Prescott City Hall, which also serves as our emergency operations communications center. We have had an unprecedented amount of rain. I've measured five inches in the southwest side of the town. So to give you a kind of a little idea of how much this is. This is almost as much as we got in a whole month in October. So this is the Super El Nino and it's combined with the Pineapple Express and it's affecting all of Arizona, especially northern Arizona. Mayor, tell us about the danger spots near your town and about the evacuation orders tonight. You know, we have several lakes and the dams are being crested. We've had the spillways open. We were prepared starting in on Monday. We started opening the spillways to lower the lake levels, but they're still being topped. So we're giving notice and have set orders for everybody downstream from Goldwater Lake and Watson Lake. What about water rescues? How much has that been going on where you are? I'll let my fire chief give you some details. Yeah, hi, it's the fire chief of the city of Prescott over Verde. We have had two swift water rescues that the city of Prescott fire department participated in today. They were both outside of our jurisdiction. One was in Groom Creek and the other one was in the National Forest. Both were happy to report resulted in successful rescues. Nobody was hurt, but obviously it's just another indication of why we really need people to understand to stay out of any low water crossing. Pay attention to the signs on the roads. For sure. Need to emphasize that in these flood water conditions, please don't try to go wading, swimming, or kayaking. It'll not end very well for you. Exactly. Mayor, I see you have other staff members there. Any message from them tonight? Well, we have our police chief. Yeah, good afternoon. John Brambilla, chief of police here in Prescott. A great effort between everyone in the city, between the parks and rec department, the public works, fire department, police department. We were preparing for this. So this morning when things started getting out out of control with our low level crossing areas, we were on top of them. We were able to keep people out of those. Immediately went to the areas we knew would be problems, started evacuating or asking people to evacuate. So just good coordination by everybody here to keep everybody safe. Then we have our city manager. Do you have any comments? Yeah, city manager Don Kimball, just reinforcing what the mayor said that folks can stay away from waterways, lakes, creeks, moving water across roads. That really helps a lot. And then I might add, we'll be assessing all the damage when the flood waters recede. Our facilities, our infrastructure, our stormwater system, but we should be up and running. So So I just wanted to invite everyone up. To enjoy the holidays here in Prescott, Arizona, Thanksgiving and Christmas. All right. Good messages. Stay safe in Prescott. Thank you all for your time tonight.