Updated October 24, 2026 at 2:24 PM MDT
On Thursday morning in Hurricane, Utah, Juana Puga stood in ankle-deep brownish water asking herself: "Why again?"
Just a couple hours earlier, at around 8:30am, Puga went out to run some errands. It wasn't raining outside, she says. But when she returned to her house, rainwater had flooded her whole yard.
"It was just coming in so fast that it was just hard to even understand," Puga says. "Within five minutes most of my house was underwater."
Rare, heavy rainfall started to hit New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona on Wednesday. Since then, brown-colored floodwaters have led to road closures, mandatory evacuations and emergency declarations across the four states. The southern Utah city of Hurricane issued an emergency declaration on Thursday after flooding damaged more than 100 homes and RVs.
Puga, her husband, and five young boys just moved back into their house on Oct. 1. A flood in August forced them to renovate and rebuild. Less than a month after her sons fixed up their new rooms, Puga says she's living through a "nightmare" again.
"We were literally in our house for only 22 days," she says. The family is staying with Puga's in-laws in one room, but are hoping to move to a rental next week.
"It's just devastating," Puga says. "So much work we put into our house and I just thought, 'why again?' "
In response to a post on X that showed brownish-red floodwaters in Hurricane, Gov. Spencer Cox, wrote on Thursday: "Our hearts are with the families whose homes and livelihoods have been impacted."
Thick, brown floodwaters
Over the weekend, the flood watch extended to central and southern New Mexico and far west Texas.
As of Saturday, areas of southern Utah, southwest Colorado, and the northern parts of Arizona and New Mexico had been hit the hardest. The intense rain led to rapidly rising floodwaters, Thursday and Friday.
In San Juan County, N.M., looking out a window on Friday afternoon, Devin Neeley saw light, puffy clouds and a blue sky. The county's public information officer for emergency management called the stark contrast to the brown rainwaters "surreal."
"[The sky] belies really the danger that is coming down the river in historic levels," Neeley says. "We have not seen flooding like this in generations."
Neeley says emergency responders rescued people on their roofs after floodwater inundated their homes. The county was put under an emergency declaration and residents in susceptible areas were told to evacuate Thursday afternoon.
"These are communities that have beautiful riverfront places to live," Neeley says. "And unfortunately, that's a problem today."
In Farmington, N.M., located in the center of the hard-hit regions, Police Chief Steve Hebbe said at a press conference on Friday that "this is singular and this is real."
"So far, we have not had any deaths that is very fortunate, but this is not something that should be played with," Hebbe said.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis declared disaster emergencies in 12 counties. Polis also authorized the use of National Guard members to assist with rescue efforts in southwest Colorado.
On Friday morning, La Plata County sheriff closed parts of the Animas River in Durango, Colo. to recreation, KSUT reported.
Aaron Schenk took out a 14-foot cataraft to glide down 26 miles of the Animas River that weren't closed.
"There were real big waves, fast currents, lots of water flooding," Schenk says. "The river in spots was half a mile wide when normally it's a couple hundred feet at most."
Schenk, who owns a sewage disposal company called Mountain Septic, expects to see an uptick in repairs across La Plata County.
"This is definitely not normal," he says, adding that the region has "received more moisture in the last, 6 or 8 weeks than we have in the entire 12 months prior."
The flooding comes after extreme weather hit the Southwest throughout the week. Arizona saw baseball-sized hail and a possible tornado that injured at least one person Wednesday evening.
A record amount of rainfall
The region's mountainous and desert terrain is conducive to flooding. In August, intense flash flooding in the Grand Canyon led to multiple deaths.
Severe thunderstorm warnings started earlier in the week, says Kris Sanders, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Grand Junction, Colo. The remnants of Hurricane Trudy, which was active from Oct. 15 to Oct. 18, in the Pacific Ocean formed into a slow-moving low-pressure system that worked its way southwest.
Sanders says a lot of the storms weakened as they came through the region, but the heavy rain did not. Portions of southwest Colorado and southeast Utah saw two to four inches, whereas areas with higher elevations, like the San Juan Mountains, got up to six inches. This caused small creeks and streams and rivers to flood.
"Those rainfall amounts are records in themselves," Sanders says.
While the amount of rainfall is rare, he says, these storms typically happen in the region at this time of year. An event last year caused major flooding in the same spots, "like a carbon copy" of this year, Sanders says.
The threat is not over, he says, and thunderstorm watches are active in many of the same areas through Sunday.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, says the severe thunderstorms are fueled by the large amount of moisture in the air. He says that moisture comes from the record-warm waters off parts of the West Coast, which are driven by an ongoing strong El Niño event and a recent marine heat wave (which he attributes largely to human-caused climate change).
The flooding isn't a surprise, he says, pointing to a prediction he and others made in the spring – that if El Niño materialized according to forecasts, southwestern U.S. could see extreme precipitation events through October.
Now, "that is exactly what we've seen," he says, "because this isn't even the first event this fall."
Puga, whose home flooded in Hurricane, Utah, says she and her neighbors have been cleaning up their properties and are trying to "see the light." She doesn't want to move and leave the community she loves, she says.
"We already did this. We can do it again," Puga says. "But it's just hard."
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