TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) – For the first time in seven years, virtually every river in Arizona is doing what rivers are supposed to do: flow with water.

Winter storms for the past two weeks have pumped runoff from rain or snow into riverbeds across the state. And with more Pacific storms headed into Arizona by Friday and early next week, the water should keep coming for a while.

“The way it normally works with these (storm) events, they saturate the soils, so if you get precipitation every couple of days, you get flow into the rivers,” said Erik Pytlak, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Tucson.

Water releases over the Granite Reef Diversion Dam were flowing in the normally dry Salt River bed through metropolitan Phoenix. The unusual sight drew spectators to Tempe Town Lake, which is built in the Salt River channel with inflatable dams.

“It’s never been flowing like that before,” said Carol McLuty, a 34-year-old loan officer who visited the lake with her daughters Wednesday.

The flow was so quick, Town Lake was emptying and refilling itself every three hours, said Chris Baxter, the lake’s marketing coordinator.

Water has been scarce for decades because of a combination of factors, chief among them drought and increased groundwater pumping. Dams that capture runoff for flood control or irrigation projects have tamed even the state’s mightiest river, the Colorado; and in some places, rivers like the San Pedro and the Little Colorado are naturally only a few car-lengths wide.

And reservoirs store runoff from wet years so water can be delivered during dry periods. This season’s rains have swollen reservoirs on the Verde River.

Current storage for the Salt River’s system rose from 40 percent to 44 percent, and projections were that it might get as high as 50 percent, said Gregg Garfin, a program manager for climate assessment with the University of Arizona’s Institute for the Study of Planet Earth.

The Theodore Roosevelt Dam, with nearly 1.1 million acre-feet of storage capacity, was 35 percent full Tuesday.

“This is the first time that it’s rained significantly in 10 years on our watershed,” said Jeff Lane, a spokesman for the Salt River Project, the utility that manages the reservoirs.

The storms have been so heavy and so quick that project officials have had to release water from the dams to ensure room for flood control in the system.

Another storm or two probably would prolong flows in central Arizona rivers for at least a few more weeks, said Chris Smith, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Tucson.

“Just because of the storms being back-to-back like this, the watersheds are saturated, and whatever falls on them is going to run off,” he said.