Floods strand 1,000 in California's Death Valley
STORY: About 60 cars belonging to park visitors and staff were buried under several feet of debris at the Inn at Death Valley, an historic luxury hotel near the park headquarters in Furnace Creek, the site of a spring-fed oasis near the Nevada border, the park said in a statement.
Floodwaters also pushed trash dumpsters into parked cars, shoved vehicles into each other, and swamped many facilities, some hotel rooms and business offices, it said.
No injuries were reported. But about 500 visitors and 500 park staff were temporarily unable to leave the park because all roads into and out of Death Valley were closed, according to the statement. After work by emergency crews, authorities escorted the cars out of the area.
Authorities are conducting aerial searches for stranded motorists but said they have not received reports of stranded cars, Death Valley National Park wrote on its Facebook page.
They expect to reopen a particularly damaged area of Highway 190 by Tuesday (August 9).
The flooding was unleashed by a torrential shower that dumped 1.46 inches of rain at Furnace Creek, nearly matching the previous daily record there of 1.47 inches measured from a downpour in 1988, park spokesperson Amy Wines said.
