© Josh Radtke/The Arizona RepublicWorkers reinforce a water-diversion canal along Campbell Road in Flagstaff on Wednesday. Last year, the Schultz Fire left the eastern slopes of the San Francisco Peaks barren and prone to flash flooding.
But the potential for tragedy and loss does not end when the flames are extinguished and wildland firefighters move on to battle their next blaze.
Last year, 12-year-old Shaelyn Wilson died not from the Schultz Fire, which burned more than 15,000 acres near Flagstaff, but from the flooding that tore through the burned-out area after a monsoon storm dropped an inch of rain in about 15 minutes nearly three weeks after the fire was contained.
As this year's monsoon storms approach, residents near Flagstaff continue to fill sandbags and take other steps to fill the place of the underbrush and foliage the fire burned out last year.
It will be a rite of summer for residents affected by the fire for years to come, said Coconino County Manager Steve Peru.
"Of course, we've always had fires up here, but we've never had it in an area that was adjacent to such a populated area," Peru said. "Just the human impact and the property impact was absolutely new to us."
This year, thousands of Arizona residents from Springerville to Sierra Vista will be joining them as fire departments in those areas have turned into sandbag-filling stations. Residents in those areas who returned from evacuations and found homes that avoided the flames will now face another menace in floods.
"We're a little unique out here. With a hurricane, you have a week to see it coming, you have the event and you have the weeks and months afterwards to start the cleanup. Here, we're looking at one long extended disaster," said Apache County sheriff's Sgt. Richard Guinn, who handled evacuations during the Wallow Fire in eastern Arizona and now works with residents to make sure they're prepared for floods.
"It's uncomfortable for those who were displaced already because of fire," Guinn said of the flood potential. "But so far we've had no deaths or injuries associated with the fire. We've got a pretty good record, and we'd like to keep that going."
But even before the sandbags and water breaks are in place, some county officials are concerned about the ability of residents to receive flood insurance.
The federal government offers such coverage through the National Flood Insurance Program and requires the policy to be in place for 30 days before residents can make a claim.
Last year, that meant residents affected by the floods that followed the Schultz Fire would have had to take a policy out on the day the fire started in order to have met the 30-day requirement by the time the floodwaters arrived.
About 8,000 residents in 1,500 homes were in the path of the Schultz Fire floods last year, and about 150 homeowners signed up for flood insurance during the 10 days that the fire burned.
Coconino County officials have spent the past year trying to stress the importance of flood insurance to any homeowner who had any doubts after watching the floodwaters destroy one home and damage more than 80 others.
They also saw the need to do work in subdivisions to prevent neighbors from turning on one another as the water flows from one property to the next.
"It wasn't like you had a disaster and you dealt with it and you recovered and you went on," Peru said. "We had a lot of opportunities for flooding and re-flooding, and that really took a toll on residents. By the end of the summer, residents were pretty frayed in terms of their nerves."
Many Arizona homeowners don't consider the need for flood insurance until a wildfire tears through their area and removes the vegetation that makes monsoon storms manageable.
Residents of Cochise and Apache counties who called about policies while this year's fires were still raging might have heard about a moratorium on new policies in their areas, but insurance officials said the blackout on new policies applies only to homeowner's insurance.
Tim Fiorello's home outside Sierra Vista was spared from the Monument Fire, thanks to the efforts of firefighters who robbed the blaze of fuels in his neighborhood, stopping the flames about a block from his home. But Fiorello's home is near a wash, presenting a new set of concerns.
"I'm thinking, 'There's no vegetation. What's going to happen when all of a sudden the storms hit? Where's all this water going to go?' " said Fiorello, the pastor at a local church.
Administrators in counties around the state are hoping that some combination of last year's tragic floods and this year's fires will encourage people to take the danger seriously.
"Yes, I think they're taking this seriously. Yes, I think they're probably fatigued," said Cochise County sheriff's spokeswoman Carol Capas. "But now they understand that you have this massive fire, that flooding will just naturally follow, unfortunately."
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