Flash floods poised to continue in disaster areas through monsoon season

Severe flash floods closed roads in Ruidoso after storms dumped rain into the burn scar of the still burning South Fork and Salt fires. (Courtesy of City of Ruidoso)

It’s the way of rain in the high desert: sometimes too little, and then a lot all at once.

With more rain expected this week, and an uncertain monsoon season ahead, flash floods threaten lives and homes in the still-burning South Fork and Salt Fires, but also in the burn scars of the 2022 Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon fires.

But human burning of fossil fuels creates hotter conditions that both speed up the drying out of the land, but also supercharge rainstorms that do build up.

“While we may get fewer storms, storms are getting more intense when they do hit,” said Andrew Mangham, a hydrologist at the Albuquerque office of the National Weather Service.

New Mexico has seen near-historic levels of moisture in the atmosphere for June.

“With climate change, with the warming of the atmosphere, and the warming of the oceans, we’re getting into a situation where the storms are capable of producing much heavier rainfall than we’ve seen in the past, simply because there’s much more water in the atmosphere,” Mangham said.

Weather experts and local officials have their eyes to the skies, urging people to heed warnings about flooding and dangerous debris flows in the coming weeks and months.

Bracing for more flooding

Officials said that first responders pulled more than 100 people from floodwaters in and around Ruidoso, which is experiencing dramatic flooding and debris flows after rains pounded the areas burned by the South Fork and Salt fires.

Ruidoso Mayor Lynn Crawford opened a Tuesday community meeting by thanking rescue crews and warned the area was continued “ground zero” for fire and flooding impacts.

“We had a lot of folks that were pulled out of the water by our local responders and swift-water teams. It was just a miracle that we didn’t have a loss of life and no serious injuries,” Crawford said.

Major General Miguel Aguilar, who leads both the New Mexico National Guard and the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, pledged the state’s resources during the recovery, at Tuesday’s meeting.

“It’s gonna be a long road, we know that. We’re not going to measure in days, unfortunately, it’ll be years before we’re completely done,” said Aguilar.

Aguilar warned that floodwaters are unpredictable after a fire.

“As many of you witnessed on Saturday and Sunday, that was a lot of water coming down off the mountain at a very, very high rate of velocity that almost no amount of obstacles can really stop,” he said.

During the webinar, people asked what flood mitigation is currently in place in Ruidoso.

Crawford responded that the city has purchased barriers to mitigate landslides and flooding, and is coordinating with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on an engineering plan to see if ponds can be built.

“There will be flooding,” he said.”There’s a really real possibility of a landslide in the Upper Canyon area.”

Concerns on Upper Canyon neighborhoods:

The city on Tuesday reopened access to Upper Canyon, an area hit hard by both fire and flood, Crawford said the area may face further closures depending on flooding risk during the week.

“If there’s rain, we’re gonna ask people to go ahead and leave the area,” he said.

He further urged people not to stay up there if they go to check on their property, reminding people that a boil water advisory is still in place.“It’s not safe to spend the night up there,” he said. “If we have rain events, there’s an issue with landslides and really severe flooding.”

‘You can’t stop the water’

Ruidoso isn’t the only place getting pummeled by floods. Las Vegas and the surrounding areas are still relying on alternate water sources, as their municipal system was overwhelmed by the flooding, as debris and more soils run into the water during heavy rains.

Neighbors have been pooling resources to address flooding, ripping through arroyos, and scattering debris downstream.

Yolanda Cruz, who’s lived in Las Vegas for more than 30 years and moderates the community recovery page, noted that she was luckier than others, with only her driveway of the mountain road washing out.

But it’ll be a costly fix, and she’s still waiting on other payments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“We still haven’t been paid by FEMA for the fires and we were affected by both the fires and flooding,” she said. “I don’t hold out much hope that it’s gonna be done quickly.”

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Her parents, who are in their 70s, saw their backyard washed away into an arroyo.

“My nephew had a car on a trailer, and that ended up in the neighbor’s driveway,” she said. “And then my parents’ propane tank was three houses away.”

She said that living with the floods means adopting an emergency mindset – having a plan for when it rains, understanding how to use sandbags, and trying to be adaptable.

“You can’t stop water,” she said. “So the most you can do is try to, maybe, route it a certain way.”

Monsoon prediction challenges

The unpredictability of monsoons, coupled with their chances of increasing ferocity, make any definitive statements about what will happen in the future difficult, said Mangham, the National Weather Service hydrologist.

The fast build-up of monsoons means that the best predictions for where rain will be, and how much might fall, only has a few day’s notice.

“​​The timescale is one to two days out,” he said. “That’s where we can say there’s a pretty good chance that in this town or this set of mountains, we’re gonna see some heavy rainfall. Once we get beyond day five, it becomes quite a bit more difficult for us.”

Instead of the non-soon of last year, where the seasonal rains failed to materialize, the die is loaded into seeing a monsoon season that could be somewhat drier than average compared to previous years.

But that tool is imprecise.

“The Sacramento mountains can get shellacked with three or four years worth of rainfall in one summer, and the whole state could still be below average,” Mangham said.

And the best estimate right now is that Ruidoso and the Sacramentos may see a wet monsoon.

Flooding occurred all over town as fierce rains pushed up floodwaters and carried ash, soils and sludge in powerful debris flows.

It was considered a storm that is seen every 350 to 400 years, said Mangnam, but with our changed climate, those powerful storms are happening more often.

“That’s definitely not the only one like that we’re going to get in the area,” he said.

Another factor for New Mexico’s rains is hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean. It got off to an explosive start with Hurricane Beryl, which is now rated as a Category 5 storm, and caused “ Armageddon-like” damage in the Caribbean .

The storm is forecasted to enter into the Gulf of Mexico , a pattern that often feeds moisture into New Mexico.

“If we’re getting more and more hurricanes, stronger hurricanes come into the Gulf of Mexico, then I think that you have to say there’s an increased chance that we’re going to be pulling moisture and and getting some pretty heavy rainfall events, especially across the southern tier of New Mexico, where the Ruidoso burn scars are,” Mangham said.

There are efforts to try and get ahead of the flash floods.

Last week the U.S. Geological Survey, a federal agency which maintains measurements on rivers and streams, helped install monitoring equipment to give more warning when river levels rise.

The increased monitoring will continue through September, triggering weather officials when rains begin, and allowing more time to issue evacuation orders.

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