Riverfront Park is closed until further notice after being flooded following severe rainstorms between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2 that affected the city of Cottonwood and the surrounding Verde Valley.
This comes as Cottonwood Mayor Ann Shaw issued a proclamation declaring the floods a local emergency Tuesday, Nov. 3.
“We’re still trying to assess all the damage,” Parks, Recreation and Library Director Jak Teel said on Nov. 4. “We still haven’t even got all the water off the field yet, so we don’t have a full assessment of what everything looks like, but the park is in rough shape.”
The damage includes the bowls at the skatepark being filled to the brim with water, fences at the softball field blown away, and a half inch of debris in certain areas. Until the park is fully assessed, the city doesn’t know the full scale of the damage or how much it will cost.
“There’s trees all over the place, there’s flipped picnic tables,” Teel said. “It tore out our horseshoe pit. It broke our slides.”
Water was being pumped out of the skatepark on the morning of Nov. 3, turning the neighboring frisbee golf course into a marsh. A “Road Closed” sign, blockades and yellow caution tape cordoned off the entrance to East River Front Road.
“They want to keep everybody out so no one gets hurt,” said Toby Gonzales, 29, a security guard with PES Security Services, a private security company based in Tempe. “Usually everybody that’s been coming, usually they’ll stop right here and they’ll ask to come in. And then I just advise them with what I was told, that they don’t want nobody crossing right here because they don’t want a safety concern.”
The city of Cottonwood has not announced any plans for when the park will reopen, but Teel said “it’s most likely going to be a phase opening and not a full open.”
In addition, sports teams and organizations who use the park facilities have found other locations to meet.
“Luckily, we just wrapped up a couple of big seasons, so that really helps.”
There has been no announcement of if the City Council will continue to meet in their chambers, which is located immediately adjacent to Riverfront Park. Teel said there is still time before their next meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 10, after press time, but how quickly they can make the site usable again are “weather based and how fast we can get things going, but the decision on if they have to move or keep their meeting here doesn’t need to be made.”
Residents in Cottonwood have been passing by the park to see the damage for themselves.
“I feel like everybody says Arizona needs water, but we’re a desert so I feel like we didn’t need that much water,” Ryanna Lemons, 18, said. She had been driving home from work on Sunday, Nov. 1, when she saw the flooding up the street near Riverfront Park. “It’s kind of crazy.
Dawn Jones, 64, grew up in Cottonwood and remembered when the Bridgeport Bridge flooded in 1993. When she passed by with her husband Jeff and her mother’s dog Buddy, she couldn’t believe it herself.
“I’ve never seen it like this before,” she said. “The highest I’ve seen was when the Bridgeport Bridge, the water was going over that. That was pretty high, but it didn’t come up like this into these neighborhoods.
The bowls became ponds at the Riverfront Park skatepark, which was flooded after rainstorms swept through Cottonwood and the Verde Valley over the weekend of Oct. 30 to Nov. 2.
