Twenty Years Later, El Paso Still Remembers the Great Floods of 2006

When it rains, it POURS here in El Paso. We've seen that in recent memory; we know how bad the roads can get it when it rains so we're encouraged to stay indoors when it happens. We certainly were reminded of that 20 years ago on August 1, 2006.

The 2006 Flood was one of the worst seen in El Paso history

While the rain lasted from July 27th to August 4, the National Weather Service said that approximately 3 to 10 inches of rain on August 1. The subsequent rain & flooding caused about $450 million worth of damage (with at least $200 million to businesses and homes & $115 damages to El Paso's stormwater system).

Thankfully no one lost their lives in the floods but rewatching the footage and looking back at the photos is just incredible...

On the 10th anniversary of the flood, KFOX-14 made a Facebook post of footage they captured from the floods on that same day. KTSM 9 also did a story talking about how much more resilient El Paso is to flood; they included footage of the floods from that same day in 2006.

KVIA ABC-7 also shared a news story about the floods; they actually shared Jorge Garcia's home video of capturing the thunderstorm as it happened. You can see the whole video on his YouTube channel. They also posted a YouTube video of Gary Warner and Estella Casas remembering the floods on the 10 year anniversary.

(Also huge thank you to KVIA for shots they took of the rain; which we will include at the end of the story)

But in my opinion, the wildest footage of the flood was captured by random citizens. If you type in "El Paso flooding 2006" on YouTube, you will find SEVERAL results on how bad the rains got.

Raymond Jackson got footage of the Pershing Dam flooding, & David Espino made a YouTube video about the flood that has over 60K views, & RayWork Productions captured amazing footage of a woman being swept away by the flood waters before she was rescued by bystanders. These are just a handful of videos you can find on YouTube...

From personal experience, I remember going on a walk around my block and only saw clouds and a little rain. I was unaware of the flooding in the city & I also unaware on how badly damaged the Blockbuster on Mesa/Thunderbird got because of the rushing water. You can see the photos posted on Reddit in the El Paso Subreddit.

Shortly afterwards they built the wall to keep from that happening again. The Blockbuster is gone but the wall is still standing to this day.

Daniel Paulus

Hearing from people's recollections was incredible too. We asked online on what people remembered from that storm & we'll share what they said at the end.

As long as El Paso gets monsoon season, we still continue to see floods, but let's hope we don't see anything of this magnitude in the future. I wasn't the only one who had memories of the Flood of 2006; Dubba G remembered that storm and how it nearly ruined one of our KLAQ events that same here. You can read his story here.

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