Maricopa takes hit from Saturday storm

Coleridge’s poetic line “Water, water, everywhere. . .” certainly applied to Maricopa Saturday when dark clouds dropped literally buckets of rain on the city, and then the winds came.

According to the National Weather Service, wind speeds hit 90 to 100 miles per hour during the storm.

Those winds did the greatest amount of damage, snapping trees in two at about midway up their trunks and even uprooting several right from the ground.

Along Porter Road the tree damage was highly visible. Resident Jim Rives noted that he had to stop his car, get out and move a fallen tree to the side since it was blocking the road. In many areas roads were still littered with fallen trees or debris on Sunday. Jackie Shaulis said her neighborhood looked like “a war zone.”

Pacana Park and Saddleback School, both on Porter Road, appeared to take a direct hit from the storm, losing many trees and leaving others leaning at 45-degree angles.

Province Community lost several large pine trees. H & N Landscaping crews were hard at work Sunday morning pruning, chopping and carrying away fallen trees and their limbs.

Some roofs received storm damage as the high winds tore at tiles, rearranging them like dominoes. One area sustaining tile damage was Glennwilde where a fallen tree took part of a wall with it in the Stonegate area. The Maricopa Public Library also sustained some roof damage.

On West Arvada Lane where the Cadence sales center is located, the flagpole, which normally dwarfs the city, is now bent with the flag hanging limply from the end.

In the common, grassy areas at Homestead community, new lakes had appeared by Sunday, with “water, water everywhere.”

Tony Debevec captured some of the storm damage seen in the images below: