Monday's storm is historic, but floods have deadly, damaging history in Ariz.

While it may have been record-setting, Monday's epic rainfall was far from the worst.

In 1970, 23 people were killed in a Labor Day flash flood east of the Valley. A 1983 flood killed 14 people across the state, severing Interstate 10 and forcing federal disaster declarations in seven counties. A 1980 deluge cut the southeast Valley off from Phoenix for days and forced widespread school closures. And a 1993 storm washed out a bridge on Mill Avenue and sent tons of garbage from a landfill cascading down the Salt River.

Despite Monday's images of cars bobbing up and down on a flooded freeway, a century of flooding has led to improvements in how the Valley deals with the rare, but not unheard of, torrential downpours.

After the flood of 1980 paralyzed the Valley, officials worked to make sure it wouldn't happen again.

And, for the most part, the steps they took helped keep Monday from being worse than it was. While freeways and streets were flooded, the Salt River, which has been the source of much of Arizona's flooding heartaches through the years, was kept within its banks.

A county project deepened and widened the Salt River channel through Phoenix, particularly near Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, said Joe Muñoz, public-information officer for Maricopa County's Flood Control District.

Without that work, "all that water flowing (Monday) would have caused tie-ups for 30 or 40 days," Muñoz said.

The Flood Control District says the largest flood in Maricopa County history was in the winter of 1891. Days of heavy rains swelled the Salt to a depth of 18 feet and 3 miles across. Adobe houses along its banks were destroyed.

The railroad bridge across the Salt in Tempe collapsed in February 1891, according to Arizona Republic archives. It took three months to build a new one. Meanwhile, provisions in the area were running short. When the first train arrived in May 1891, according to the Phoenix Herald, "whistles blew cheerfully and everybody felt better."

Until Monday, the record for a single day of rainfall was Sept. 5, 1939, when 2.5 inches of rain fell in the Phoenix area in just over two hours. The total for that day was just under 3 inches.

Breaks in the Arizona Canal sent water rushing into yards and streets near 16th Street and Bethany Home Road. Pictures show vehicles attempting to cross flooded roads. A 13-year-old drowned attempting to ride his bike along Central Avenue where it entered the river bottom. The story was the main front-page headline in the next day's Republic, besting the Allies' march against the Nazis in Europe.

The Salt River had virtually no flow through Phoenix from 1938 until 1965, according to a state Department of Transportation document created in 1981, but a string of flows in the mid-1960s and through the '70s would change that.

Floods from late December 1965 into January 1966 washed out all Salt River crossings in Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa and Scottsdale. Sun Devil Stadium was surrounded by water. A runway at Sky Harbor was closed.

Between October 1977 and February 1980, there were seven regional floods.

The last one knocked out all of the bridged crossings over the Salt River except for the Central Avenue and Mill Avenue bridges.

The state pressed a commuter-rail train into service from Mesa to downtown Phoenix, with some stops in Tempe and east Phoenix. The train was called the Hattie B., named after the wife of then-Gov. Bruce Babbitt.

At the time, Muñoz, the flood-control spokesman, worked at KOY-AM in downtown Phoenix and took the Hattie B. from his home in Tempe. A friend would drive and pick him up from the station in downtown Tempe, a building now home to Macayo's Depot Cantina restaurant.

Though it was free, Muñoz said, the train was often crowded to capacity, forcing passengers to wait for the next train. After three days, Muñoz packed up a bag and decided to just stay at a hotel in downtown Phoenix.

That flooding prompted officials to re-enforce bridges and make a deeper channel for the Salt River. Phoenix spent $5 million on rebuilding the bridges that The Republic joked were only worthwhile when there was no water beneath them.

A city engineer told the newspaper in 1986, as construction on the last bridge began, that the structures were built in the mid-1960s, at a time when the river had been dry for nearly 25 years. They were built with floods of historic proportions in mind.

Then-Mayor Terry Goddard said the project meant that "never again will our city be cut in half by traffic tie-ups caused by floodwaters."

The rest of the state has not been immune to nature's lash.

The 23 fatalities in 1970 were the result of a tragic confluence. It was Labor Day weekend, and campers in remote areas could not get word that record rainfall from the remnants of Tropical Storm Norma would send a deluge their way. Most of the fatalities were along Tonto Creek on the Mogollon Rim, including 14 near Kohl's Ranch, which received an estimated 7 inches of rain.

A National Weather Service report on the tragedy said all but four of the victims were in automobiles, attempting to outrun the water.

In 1983, the remnants of another tropical storm, Octave, swept through the state on the first weekend of October, spawning a deadly wave of flooding across a broad swath of the state.

The raging Gila River was more than a mile wide in places and washed out Interstate 10 south of the Valley.

Residents of the rural communities of Stanfield and Maricopa were forced to climb onto their roofs and wait for National Guard helicopters to rescue them as flood waters lapped at their feet.

In all, 14 people were killed in the floods, including a Department of Public Safety helicopter pilot and a paramedic who were coming to the aid of a pregnant woman. Thousands of people were evacuated, and more than 800 homes were destroyed. The mining communities of Clifton and Morenci in eastern Arizona were particularly hard-hit, with 700 homes destroyed in Clifton alone, and agricultural towns like Marana, north of Tucson, saw their crops devastated.

President Ronald Reagan issued federal disaster declarations for seven counties as damages climbed past half a billion dollars.

A decade later, in January 1993, torrential rains over several days and swollen reservoirs on the Salt River forced the release of cascades of water from upstream dams.

In a dramatic scene that was captured on live television, hundreds of onlookers who had gathered in Tempe to see the normally-dry river rage looked on as it washed away a Mill Avenue bridge that was under construction.

The water also cut deep enough into the riverbank to dislodge tons of trash from a nearby landfill, sending it cascading downstream and creating an environmental crisis.

More recently, a timeline kept by the Maricopa County Flood Control District shows several incidents of heavy rains and flooding in the past decade. Water rescues and freeway shutdowns are not uncommon.

Muñoz said his agency figured that 2014 would be slow for monsoons. "We thought there'd be a lot of dust, you know, haboobs and we'd all laugh," he said. "Mother Nature has a way of changing your mind real quick."