SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Sometimes heavy but isolated rains Thursday caused street flooding in parts of the Phoenix metro area and filled a wash with a rushing torrent of water that trapped two motorists.
Firefighters waded into the Indian Bend Wash on Thursday afternoon, helping two people out of two cars and walking them to dry land. The rescuers huddled around the motorists as they walked through water than came to about their knees.
The wash, a normally dry stream bed, runs with water during heavy storms and roads that cross it are barricaded at those times. It wasn't clear if the cars that were trapped Thursday had crossed any barrier.
Elsewhere Thursday, a woman driving through a flooded Phoenix intersection became trapped momentarily when the rushing water began to slowly move her car but firefighters rescued her without incident, said Mike Sandulak, a division chief with the Phoenix Fire Department.
Several other cars were also stranded in the intersection but no one else needed to be rescued, Sandulak said.
Sandulak said that usually people needing rescues in such situations have driven past barricades but that the woman trapped Thursday hadn't done that.
National Weather Service meteorologist Doug Green said between 1 1/2 inches and two inches of rain fell Thursday in some isolated spots around the Phoenix metropolitan area, causing some street flooding.
"As far as anything catastrophic, we've heard nothing," Green said.
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox