In this time of year, Phoenix weather is damn near perfect. Low 90s during the day, low 80s at night. Here, the saying “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”, is proven by contrapositive, because nestled in the Sonoran desert, Phoenix has no humidity, and the heat just feels nice. This is why I’ve taken every opportunity to take walks at night. To add to the perfection, it never rains. In 2020, it rained a total of 15 days in Phoenix, and the last time it rained here since writing this is August of 2020.
At least, that’s what I thought before I left the house today. I didn’t even make it ten steps past my front door before I saw this.
Flooded! Naturally, I have questions. How good is the insulation in my house that I didn’t hear the monsoon passing through tonight? How unlucky is this person that her yard is naturally shaped like a bowl and so nothing can drain off? Also, why is the owner not freaking out? Are her noise-cancelling headphones as good as mine?
I walked away before the owner could come out and suspect I caused this. But here’s what I walked into.
Poor guy can’t even get out of his front door because his porch is a lake. Once again, this yard was shaped in a way seemingly designed to drown in water. Conversely, the drainage system in the rest of the infrastructure is impeccable. The streets are dry, as are the sidewalks, and the rooftops. It somehow took me this long to realize the water must’ve not come from the sky, but from underground.
I lied, I still hadn’t figured it out until I encountered this house, which had a visible source of water gushing from right in the middle of the yard. Of course, it hadn’t rained at all. The neighborhood’s sewer system must’ve had a burst pipe. What I was looking at was not just water, but poop water. I was ashamed of myself of not being able to detect this by smell, but relieved that I never tried to dive in and find the root cause.
If I’m being honest, I didn’t care enough about the damage to actually do something about it. I only cared enough to go around the entire neighborhood and take a picture of every house that was drowning.
As I round the corner that leads back to my house, I pull out my phone to take one more picture, but I stop short of actually pointing the camera because I saw a man walking towards me from the shadows. This neighborhood has always felt safe to me, but something about the fact that he was wearing strange boots and carrying a large tool/weapon made me not want to take any chances. I have yet to Google if Arizona has one of those stand-your-ground laws, and this is not how I want to find out.
Instead, I crossed the street and made it back to my neighbor’s house, the OG, the first one that I noticed with the flooding. I reflected on the fact that I had encountered no one freaking out about their damaged property. No one was swimming in their yard trying to find the leak, and no one seemed to be calling their insurance company. I stood there thinking about this while staring mindlessly at the newly formed lake in front of me.
“You admiring the irrigation system?”
I turned around and the man with the giant tool was right behind me, not socially distanced. I laugh a little, indicating that I understood his sarcasm, but he insisted he was serious. I wasn’t buying it, so I ask him to expand on his point.
“Flood irrigation is a preferred method of watering your lawn over the traditional sprinkler system because it penetrates much deeper into the soil. Sprinkler water only goes down about 3 inches on average, while this water will go all the way down to 8 feet! It’s also much cheaper, and packed with more nutrients, as the water comes from the canal system built into the Salt River, and not from city metered water. The whole system is also completely powered by gravity.”
At this point he noticed that I was more paying attention to the giant tool in his hand and not what he was saying.
“Oh, this? Yep, this is for opening and shutting the valves. My job is to go around and flood all these houses. I open the valve, wait for the yard to completely fill up, then I turn it off. Homeowners gets this done every two weeks for a healthy lawn.”
As he’s saying this, he’s walking into the yard I had spent so long staring at. It was full, and it was time to shut the valve. I ask if I can take a picture of him doing it. He’s cool with it.
