ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – Nearly a month after a huge storm on June 29 which led to massive flooding around the city, many in the community are left wondering why the flooding was so bad in Martineztown—especially since the city had just built a new pump station there.
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KRQE News 13 spoke with the city and the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Utility Water Authority about what went wrong that night. The pump station on Broadway Boulevard and Marble Avenue is nearly brand new—it was built in 2022; but last month a perfect storm of failures caused the pumps not to kick in, allowing the area to flood.
“Broadway was a stream, a vicious stream up over the sidewalks and they couldn’t even get through it,” said Arnold Pitsley, who has lived in Martineztown for the past ten years.
On June 29, nearly an inch and a half of rain fell in less than an hour. It was the 18th wettest day in recorded Albuquerque history.
“There was some accumulation of water in this area, some street flooding, and the station was needed in order to carry that water away and prevent catastrophic flooding in this neighborhood,” said David Morris, Public Affairs Manager for the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority.
The Marble Arno Pump Station was installed after years of catastrophic flooding in the area. The roughly $17 million pump station—owned by the city and operated by the water authority—is supposed to collect up to 6.8 million gallons of rainwater and pump it into the Rio Grande. However, on the night of June 29, the system failed. “The pumps that this station operates on were supposed to kick in under certain circumstances,” Morris said but they didn’t.
Morris said the settings on the pumps were wrong, and when the water started to accumulate an alert was supposed to go out to the water authority’s control center. “The station is hooked into our telemetry system and it will send an alarm to our control center if there’s a problem. Unfortunately, on the night in question, there was a power outage at the control center,” Morris said. Those alerts were lost to the storm.
It actually took the Mayor of Albuquerque witnessing the flooding in that area firsthand to get emergency authorities out to the station.
“The mayor came out himself about nine clock and noticed the flooding, and he started calling around and was able to get in touch with AFR and our general services department director Nathan Martinez and they were able to get into the station and about 11:30[pm] they were able to turn the station on, they manually turned the station on,” said Dan Mayfield, Public Information Officer for the Department of Municipal Development for the city.
Even so, that was hours after the flooding began. “On the night in question, our crews were stretched very thin dealing with issues all over town that were related to that storm,” Morris said, “As soon as we found out there was an issue over here, obviously it was a top priority.”
“It was sort of cascading issues but fortunately, and the important thing to remember is that, it did ultimately work and when it did, it did it’s job great and prevented anything catastrophic from happening,” Morris said.
“As soon as the switches were hit, this started draining like a swimming pool and just started pumping water out it was pretty quick,” Mayfield said.
However, some community members are left wondering what this means for the next big storm: “I’m not at all confident. I mean you can look at it. What have they done? They’ve done nothing,” Pitsley said.
Officials say they are looking at adding more alert systems to the station so this doesn’t happen again. They also were in the process of upgrading their alert communication system prior to the storm.
The water authority will discuss the incident and how to move forward at the next board meeting on August 21 at 5:00 pm in council chambers at City Hall in Albuquerque.
The city pays the water authority $800,000 a year to operate these pump stations.
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