I live around 40 miles west of Denver in the foothills. (Our County's western border is defined by the Continental Divide...25 miles from my house... its a bit lumpy here.
http://clearcreekcounty.org/ ) So, yes, there are definitely flashfloods during storms when we have heavy rain. Last Sept/Oct there was a huge problem in those foothills and out on the northern flatlands because we had a storm cell park over Boulder and dump a "500 year flood" amount. If there is tapioca-pearl-sized hail at my house, by the time it gets to the Metro Area its nickel or bigger sized and does real damage. The lumps of granite knock down tornadoes for me though! I appreciate that a lot.
The odd part is that when I've been in the mountains I've only ever had one scary rain/flashflood thing happen, but have had more than two within the metro cities area.
About two years ago -
topography of the Denver Metro area is rolling hills with a couple distinct river cuts (think High Plains Drifter) - it was pouring rain like it has been for the current past couple days, and I was trying to get home from one of the southern 'burbs. It was raining so hard, and I was at the crest of one of the prairie swells, on a very main street (Sheridan Ave., three traffic lanes each direction) that my car was being washed sideways off the pavement. It wouldn't have been so bad to have been just washed sideways out of control into a lawn or parking lot, but there were cars all around me that also were being washed sideways, plus a lot of drivers had stopped/parked in a row on that side to wait out the rain, which we were all being pushed toward. I drive a GEO Metro and could just see my poor little pretend car being squashed like a pop can by any of several of the surrounding behemoths. There was no traction possible. We were all floating in the ?-inches-deep creek of rain. There was zero way to get out of it, to impact what it was doing, or to do anything at all to save the situation. [And then when you do suddenly get some traction it would jerk and over-correct like on a slide on ice... Too much fun!] The other part was that it was a nice nondescript rain which transitioned into evil downpour in about a half a minute. I tried to move to the right to wait out the squalls the instant it started to dump, but didn't have time to get over even one lane.
So I'll trust my mountains over the cities any time there's severe weather.
[I have had some times when I was trying to get home and it snowed so heavily in the hour or so from when I headed home that the car high-centered and floundered like a turtle on a fence post. One time I lucked out and just happened to be rescued by a County plow after a 20-30 minutes. You sort of keep extra stuff in your car, like blankets and clothes, a can or other metal container to melt snow for water, a candle, kitty littler, munchies, stuff like that just in case. I have toy tire chains for my little pretend car, and might be ok for a couple days if it got really bad. However - my sense of challenge/adventure has decreased in direct inverse proportion to my years having increased... the thrill is gone, so I generally just don't tend to go when the weather is nasty.]
But back to the "semi-arid" part, heavy rain in the foothills didn't used to happen very often, but I much prefer it to smoke and fire...
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