An Arizona woman was still missing Monday after being swept away at Utah’s Zion National Park three days earlier as…
An Arizona woman was still missing Monday after being swept away at Utah’s Zion National Park three days earlier as flooding surged through the southwestern United States and imperiled tourists visiting the region’s scenic parks.
Farther east, heavy rains pummeled the Dallas-Fort Worth area on Monday, causing streets to flood and submerging vehicles as officials warned motorists to stay off the roads.
Park rangers at Zion National Park had not provided any additional updates as of Monday morning regarding the search for Jetal Agnihotri, a 29-year-old from Tucson, Arizona, whose brother told a local television station she could not swim.
Agnihotri was among a group of hikers who were swept away by floodwaters rushing through a popular hiking location in one of the park’s many slot canyons. All of the hikers except Agnihotri were found on high ground and were rescued after water levels receded.
Elsewhere in the region, businesses and trails remained closed in the town of Moab, Utah which was overwhelmed with floodwaters over the weekend. Nearly 200 hikers had to be rescued in New Mexico, where flooded roads left them stranded in Carlsbad Caverns National Park.
Though much of the region remains in a decades-long drought, climate change has made weather patterns more variable and left soils drier and less absorbent, creating conditions more prone to floods and monsoons.
Flooding has swept parts of southern Utah in and around Moab and Zion throughout the summer, causing streams of water to cascade down from the region’s red rock cliffs and spill out from the sides of riverbanks.
Zion is known for dangerous flash flooding that can suddenly trap people in slot canyons that fill up quickly and surprise tourists, including The Narrows, where Agnihotri found herself trapped. The passage can be as narrow as a window in some spots and several hundred feet deep.
In September 2015, a similar storm killed seven hikers who drowned in one of Zion’s narrow canyons. Flooding can turn them into deadly channels of fast-moving water and debris in mere minutes.
During that same storm, the bodies of another 12 people were found amid mud and debris miles away in the nearby town of Hildale, Utah, a community on the Utah-Arizona border. A group of women and children were returning from a park in two cars when a wall of water surged out of a canyon and swept them downstream and crashing into a flooded-out embankment, with one vehicle smashed beyond recognition. Three boys survived. The body of a 6-year-old boy was never found.
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Associated Press journalists Jamie Stengle and Jake Bleiberg in Dallas, Julie Walker in New York and Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.
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