Heavy Rains Bring Floods to Southwest : Weather: A woman is swept away and killed in Las Vegas. Storm moves to California, swamps Twentynine Palms.

Torrential overnight rains caused flooding throughout the Southwest on Monday, killing one woman in Las Vegas, stranding people in stalled cars and forcing evacuations from the gambling mecca to south-central Texas.

As the storms moved into Southern California desert communities later in the day, homes and businesses in the desert city of Twentynine Palms were flooded after a 30-minute downpour, and a stretch of Interstate 15 in eastern San Bernardino County was closed temporarily after flooding left the roadway littered with mud and debris.

Nevada and Texas, however, bore the brunt of the storms’ fury.

The body of Rose Worcester, 24, of Las Vegas, was found when more than 800 workers at the Imperial Palace were cleaning the flood control channel beneath the hotel and casino, which is built on stilts, said Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Lt. Randy Oaks. Her car was found in another channel about a mile from her body.

The National Weather Service said up to 14 inches of rain hit San Antonio, while rain at Las Vegas was much less severe--two inches in some parts of the Las Vegas Valley early Monday. But rapid runoff on the sunbaked Nevada soil meant water ran up to eight feet deep in some of the washes--the shallow gullies etched across the sloping city from west to east.

Residents were evacuated from at least one apartment complex near the Las Vegas Strip, and most major north-south roads were closed by water that overflowed flood channels before subsiding shortly before dawn Monday.

Clark County fire spokesman Bob Leinbach said 30 cars were swept away in the washes and five people were rescued from vehicles stalled in floodwaters.

Rain continued to fall in San Antonio on Monday after a night of downpours.

“All over town in the low-lying areas they are evacuating people,” said Jenny Garcia, a Dimmit County Sheriff’s Department dispatcher in Carrizo Springs. “All morning long it’s been somebody stuck here, somebody stuck there.”

Evacuation shelters were set up in the Texas counties of Zavala and Dimmit, where flooding closed several roads, authorities said.

Shopkeepers arrived Monday to find merchandise swept away and water soaking what was left.

“It looks like a wall of water came down here, not just rising water,” said Jim Ory, owner of a dress shop near San Pedro Creek. Ory and his employees rushed damaged wedding gowns to dry cleaners.

At the Operation Friendship thrift store, workers threw out clothes. “It’s sewer water--it smells something terrible,” assistant manager Iris Dominguez said.

“Dozens and dozens” of people around San Antonio were rescued from cars stalled during the night by deep water, said police assistant Sylvia Sneary.

One mobile home washed into the San Saba River near Menard where authorities rescued half a dozen people.

Despite the downpours, San Antonio and other communities intended to enforce mandatory water rationing that took effect Sunday after weeks without rain.

In Southern California, Twentynine Palms was hit with winds up to 55 m.p.h. and pelted with rain and hail “the size of marbles” for 20 minutes Monday afternoon, city spokeswoman Mary Orozco said.

“You could hear it coming from miles away,” Orozco said. “It was like a loud rumble and then pow, there were these sheets of raining coming down.”

Traffic came to a standstill as water running “three feet deep” poured along the city’s main thoroughfares, carrying sand, trash and rocks, Orozco said. There were scattered reports of flooding, damaged roadways and fender-benders, and a large boulder toppled down a hill and blocked a portion of California 26. But there were no major injuries.

In eastern San Bernardino County, authorities closed the two southound lanes of Interstate 15 after flash flooding left the pavement blanketed in mud and debris.

June Welch, a California Highway Patrol spokeswoman in Barstow, said a four-mile stretch of the freeway near Baker was closed at 3:15 p.m. as torrential rains hammered the hard desert floor.

People were “slipping and sliding all over the place,” Welch said. Motorists heading south were forced to wait or head back to Nevada until the roadway was reopened to traffic at 5:15 p.m.

Welch said there were several minor accidents as motorists slid on the slippery stretch but no serious injuries.

The storms that battered Southern California were part of a system, fueled by tropical moisture funneling in from Mexico, that originated in southwestern Nevada near the Colorado River.