The Salt Lake Tribune reports that “those who died and are missing include young children, one as young as 4, and their mothers”.
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Hildale, home to fewer than 3,000 people, is twinned with Colorado City, across the border in Arizona, where officials were due to hold a news conference later on Tuesday.
“Unbeknownst to them, a flash flood had developed up in the canyon and it came rushing down, and it actually came around behind the vehicles and engulfed the vehicles”, the mayor said. The Washington County Emergency Services Department said Tuesday morning that rescue crews were still searching for the five missing.
“Those two vehicles washed down in just a moment”, he continued.
Barlow says this highly religious community will have to move on, one day at a time.
But members of Jeffs’ sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), are discouraged from having contact with the outside world and may have not received the warnings. An official said the flooding looked like a “wall of water”.
What they apparently did not know was that a flash flood was brewing in the canyon above, he said.
The torrent was so fast, “it was taking concrete pillars and just throwing them down, just moving them like plastic”, said Lorin Holm, who called the storm the heaviest in the 58 years he’s lived in the community. Emergency responders from the cities of Hildale, Colorado City, Hurricane and from the Washington County Sheriff’s office, along with search and rescue workers from Mohave County and Apple Valley, were on the scene Monday night.
The ninth victim was found in the Arizona side of the border Tuesday at about noon, Fox 13 reported. The rain also swept away at least one vehicle parked in a driveway in Colorado City and left red mud caked over numerous roads.
Chris and Lydia Wyler, of Hildale, say heavy rainfall often attracts spectators who like to splash in it and watch because it surges by way of creeks.
“The heightened flows are anticipated to remain in the area through the afternoon hours”, the agency said in a statement. “Sometimes it’s just gone, nearly instantaneously”, he told INSIDE EDITION. “And then the sun was shining again”.
Authorities in Utah found four more bodies Tuesday in the aftermath of a flash flood described as a “wall of water” that swept away a van and an SUV near the Utah-Arizona state line Monday, bringing the death toll to 12.
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Barlow said the rescue effort was ongoing through the night but scaled back because of treacherous conditions in the sister towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona.
