Monsoon season has a way of reminding the Valley who’s really in charge, and this week’s storms did exactly that.
According to KTAR.com, strong monsoon storms moved through the Phoenix area on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, leaving thousands of residents without power. The outlet reported that SRP and APS were working to restore service after outages affected more than 30,000 Valley customers late Wednesday.
By about 6:30 a.m., KTAR said more than 4,400 Salt River Project customers and approximately 500 Arizona Public Service customers were still without electricity, based on the utilities’ outage maps. By 10 a.m., APS was down to fewer than 100 customers affected by weather-related outages, while SRP’s map still showed more than 2,000 customers without electricity. KTAR noted that it wasn’t clear how many of those SRP outages were tied specifically to Wednesday night’s storms.
The storm activity was heavy enough to leave a mark in more than one part of the Valley. KTAR quoted National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Kuhlman saying the storms moved into east Phoenix, then consolidated and shifted into central Phoenix before redeveloping over Tempe, Chandler and Mesa. He said those areas saw the heaviest rainfall, with amounts of up to 1¼ inches.
There was also damage at Marcos de Niza High School in Tempe, KTAR reported, though classes were still scheduled to go on Thursday. And while the storms packed a punch in the immediate aftermath, KTAR said the lingering weather would limit storm chances across the lower deserts later in the day.
For anyone who spent part of the morning checking outage maps or waiting for the lights to come back on, it was another familiar monsoon headache — the kind that makes even a short-lived storm feel like a much bigger event across the Valley.
