Deluge Turns Tribe’s Quiet to Panic : Nature: A flood devastates an Indian village in Grand Canyon. Now, residents are trying to assess damage to homes, land and livestock.

Tim Uqualla was riding behind his string of fully loaded pack horses toward his village in the Grand Canyon when the biggest flash floods of his life roared down Havasu Creek, sweeping the animals away like toys.

Each was weighted with six, 80-pound sacks of feed pellets. As the floundering horses vanished in the sudden wall of water, rock and mud, Uqualla was certain they would drown.

Instead, the water made the pellets swell, causing the sacks to burst open. Free of weight, the frightened horses scrambled to safety.

Toni Holmeyer, a kindergarten teacher at the Havasupai School, was one of those hiking down the solitary eight-mile trail when the flood struck on Labor Day afternoon.

“It looked like it was a 50-foot torrent of water just going over and over and over,” she said. After spending a fearful night stranded on a rock, she surveyed her surroundings.

“You could see where the water had come,” she said. “The trees were uprooted. The bridges were gone. The houses were leaning.”

Six days after the deluge, Havasupai tribal members are still uncertain how many horses and other livestock were lost, tribal chairman Don Watahomigie said. “The whole village has been pretty much in a panic,” he added.

A walking tour of Supai reveals the devastation. Several houses near the normally placid Havasu Creek took the full force of the flood and were knocked off their foundations or leveled. Few homes or gardens were spared. About a third of the 518 acres under cultivation was washed away. Everywhere the fences are down. Crops, saddles, blankets and other possessions are gone.

Many families fled to the talus slopes and canyon walls high over the valley floor and are only now returning to their muddied homes after camping there most of the week.

Only twice before in memory--in 1910 and 1928--has a flood this size thundered down the narrow canyon where the Havasupai Indians have made their home in the Grand Canyon since the 1300s.

To the thousands of tourists who visit every year, Supai is a lush paradise in a narrow place. Generally cut off from the outside world, the tiny village of 700 Indians is a world-renowned destination for its high, red canyon walls, majestic tall cottonwood trees and its clear, blue-green creek from which the people take their tribal name.

But after the hourlong rainstorm last Monday sent a 14-foot wall of water down Havasu Creek and through the village, it turned the peace of the place to terror for visitor and resident alike.

“The area around this Supai village is flat, semi-arid desert,” explained Coconino County Sheriff Joe Richards. “The surrounding area of perhaps more than 2,000 square miles and its drainage canyons, all feed into two major canyons, into Hualapai Canyon and into Cataract Canyon. Those two canyons feed right down into the village of Supai.”

When the flood began, Roland Manakaja said, his family went to see how quickly the creek was rising, only to be left with too little time to head for higher ground.

“It rose so fast that within five minutes it was already up to our house,” he said.

Wanna Manakaja, his mother, who lives next door, said her granddaughter was crying and screaming that the family’s hens had been washed away. “She said to me, ‘Grandma, Grandma, our chickens are all died.’ ”

While the creek was at flood stage, the gathering rain on the plateau above found its way into little-used washes and turned three huge notches on the cliffs hundreds of feet above the village into thundering waterfalls.

In the half-mile wide valley, the tiny village held on under 18 inches of water at its shallowest point and perhaps 20 feet at its deepest. Everything loose in the path of the flow was washed over the three famous waterfalls below the town and down the 11 miles to the Colorado River.

Tribal ranger Clayton Watahomigie said he went down to the campground at dusk to warn tourists to evacuate and was caught in the flood himself.

“I had to climb up a tree,” he said. “When it got lower, I swam across. It was about chest high.” He said he saw huge cottonwoods tumbling end over end down the stream.

“It was like the flood was playing with them,” he said.

At first light Wednesday, Army National Guard helicopters evacuated 60 tourists and returned for 107 elderly tribal members and many young children.

In calmer times, the village’s single, shaded dirt lane leads past the cafe, store, post office, clinic, school, church, tribal offices and modest homes. There are no cars, no gas stations. Every family relies on horses, the only means of transportation to the canyon rim.

Since mid-week, though, the chop of Army helicopters has replaced the thud of hooves as water, food, animal feed, hand tools, medicines and empty sandbags--80,000 pounds in all--are delivered. The single trail to the village is still impassable. Telephone service and electricity were quickly restored, but it will be weeks before the sewer, water and irrigation systems can be replaced, raising concern among health officials.

“Right now the sewage is going down into the creek,” said Dr. Philip Woodall, who fears an outbreak of disease.

Despite their new problems, many Havasupais say the flood was a sign from nature regarding another threat the tribe has grappled with for years--potential uranium mining.

This spring a federal court cleared the way for a Denver-based mining company to sink a 1,500-foot shaft 35 miles east of the reservation.

The Havasupai have long feared that a flood such as this one would wash uranium tailings all the way into their canyon home to contaminate water and soil.

“In spite of the devastation that we’ve experienced, it can be worse if the mines go in,” said Roland Manakaja. “I’m thankful the mines aren’t there. If they were, we probably wouldn’t drink this water again.”