John Klingenberg has farmed along the Gila River for 33 years. This year could be his last.
He and his wife, Mary Jean, packed their belongings Thursday, stacked sandbags around their house and prepared to move away from the flood-swollen river they expect to swallow their 350-acre farm in the next few days."If we lose it, it's going to be pretty devastating to us," said Klingenberg, who farms cotton and grain. "What we come back to, we don't know."
The normally dry river, fed by water cascading over the spillway of Painted Rock Dam, 90 miles east of Yuma, already has spread onto many fields in Arizona's richest agricultural region. Thousands of acres of winter vegetables and other crops are threatened, along with the homes of as many as 3,500 people.
More than 500 people have left. Others are packed and ready to move as the water works its way downstream.
Flows from the spillway and control gates reached 23,000 cubic feet per second Thursday afternoon, far above the 12,500 cfs that bridges and flood-control structures downstream can handle. The flow was expected to reach 27,000 cfs by the end of Thursday and peak sometime next week at 30,000 cfs to 50,000 cfs, said Jim Myrtetus, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers.
Keith Kelly, the state agriculture director, said $10 million worth of crops already have been abandoned in flooded fields.
Runoff from record rains during the past two months have formed a vast lake behind Painted Rock Dam, an earthen structure 175 feet high and nearly a mile long.
Painted Rock Reservoir, which was built to contain storm runoff and is normally no more than a puddle, covered 80 square miles Thursday and was more than double the size of Roosevelt Lake, the state's largest, Kelly said.
The river leaving Painted Rock is not in a defined channel but in a shallow area a mile or more wide in places. It passes through thousands of acres of vegetable, grain and cotton fields, many of which have not yet been harvested.
Robert Nickerson, who farms wheat and vegetables, including broccoli, said half his 1,200-acre farm was under water by Thursday, and he expected at least 850 acres would be unusable by the time the flood hits its peak.
He said the 850 acres already has been planted, and he will lose the crop. He estimated the loss at $650,000 and said it would cost an additional $2,000 an acre to reclaim the land once the water recedes.
"We're either going to have the resources to come back or we aren't," Nickerson said. "We just don't know."