When the Colorado River swelled due to the storm, Chenoa Nickerson, a 33-year-old tourist who had arrived from Gilbert for a vacation in the Grand Canyon, had no escape. The storm, violent, sudden and out of the ordinary for this season, caused the river level to rise. The blonde hiker was walking along the Colorado but was not wearing a life jacket. She was swept away. Her body was recovered on Sunday. Another 104 tourists risked death. They were saved by the Arizona National Guard, which also used a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter to pull them out of the gorge that runs alongside Havasu Creek, one of the most beautiful areas of the Grand Canyon National Park, which attracts thousands of Italians to the United States every year. But it is also one of the most dangerous areas in the event of sudden storms.
“We knew it was going to rain, but there was nothing to suggest it was going to be flooded,” Shruti Chopra, 34, who was on a hike with her husband and a group of friends, told CNN. “It didn’t even occur to us that we were in danger.”
The Indians who live on the Havasupai reservation had understood that those clouds racing quickly on the horizon did not bring anything good. Very black, threatening, different from usual. “Higher, higher,” one of them shouted as soon as the storm began to the small group of Shruti and her companions who had taken shelter in a bay. “From the alarmed voice of that man on horseback and the river that was starting to rise I understood that we were in danger,” Chopra recalls, still in shock. “We fled and for three hours we crossed rivers, formed human chains, we climbed by holding on to bushes and even prickly cacti. At a certain point a huge boulder crashed right in front of us. It hit a tree, a gigantic branch broke off and almost overwhelmed us. We saw a village in the distance, we took refuge there.”
Footage of the disastrous flooding, captured by some of the tourists trapped in the canyon, has been making the rounds on social media. The park service and the Coconino County medical examiner are now conducting an investigation to determine whether the extreme weather conditions could have been predicted and the Grand Canyon could have been closed to the public, thus preventing the death of the hiker trapped in the water.
Meanwhile, Native American tribal leaders have evacuated the village of Supai, eight miles below the rim of the canyon. Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, who activated the National Guard to rescue tourists, congratulated the rescuers who intervened in extreme weather conditions. “Nothing had prepared us for what would happen”: statements from survivors of the tragic vacation bounced across American television.
#Tourist #Drowns #Colorado #Time
2024-08-28 13:47:02
