This is what the McDaniel Drive Bridge looked like after flooding from the South Fork Fire in the Ruidoso area, according to an Aug. 22 letter from the state to FEMA. This and five other bridges were never fully repaired after the 2008 Hurricane Dolly aftermath and again sustained damage during the disaster this year. (Photo courtesy NM DHSEM)
In the summer of 2008, Hurricane Dolly made landfall in South Texas, the remnants of which caused a river in Ruidoso to rise far above its banks, culminating in a powerful flood that killed one man, stranded hundreds and destroyed nine bridges.
Soon after, former President George W. Bush approved a federal disaster declaration request from then-Gov. Bill Richardson, allowing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide assistance to individuals and local governments. That included making the bridges eligible for repair through FEMA’s Public Assistance program.
But 16 years later, when the South Fork and Salt fires burned through the area, six of the nine bridges were usable but still in a state of disrepair: Hastily fixed multiple times with asphalt, shotcrete and other patchwork solutions that Ruidoso Mayor Lynn Crawford likened to “spit, baling wire and some duct tape.”
As early monsoon rains fell on burn-scarred mountainsides this year, debris flows and floods again damaged the same six bridges and made them impossible to cross.
Residents in Upper Canyon, Brady Canyon and elsewhere were temporarily stranded again, Crawford said. As of Tuesday, five of the six bridges have yet to be cleared, according to the state.
“The people that stay there are running the risk that they may be stranded,” the mayor told Source New Mexico on Monday. “And we’ve had to do swift water rescues and help people across the river.”
The bridges cross Rio Ruidoso throughout town and serve varying numbers of residents. Several bridges are “very impactful to residential areas,” said Ali Rye, deputy director for the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
The bridges are likely the oldest unfinished Public Assistance projects in New Mexico, Rye said. She could think of only one other project that took nearly as long to complete, which was a bridge destroyed in a flood in Alamogordo in 2014 and then fixed in the last year or so.
The Public Assistance program provides reimbursement, typically for 75% of costs, to local governments for infrastructure repairs they completed after a disaster. Governments like the one in Ruidoso often have to deal with a lot of paperwork to secure approvals from FEMA that their projects will be reimbursed. Then they have to find the money to conduct inspections and complete the work before repairs can begin.
Local leaders across the state have described long delays and heavy burdens to receive Public Assistance reimbursement following recent disasters in New Mexico.
The state Legislature has approved $170 million in zero-interest loans for local governments over the last two years to areas recovering from wildfires, a measure based, in part, on the expected delays from the FEMA program.
The delays are also central to lawsuits FEMA filed by a school district, electrical co-op and county government in northern New Mexico earlier this year.
A maze of bureaucracy, unfinished bridges
Rye said the fault for the unfixed bridges is a “three-way street” between the state, federal and local governments. She said her agency is better-equipped now than it was in 2008 to do the “hand-holding” required to help local governments navigate the federal bureaucracy.
“We weren’t in the disaster business. We didn’t understand it. We weren’t good at it, and over the course of a few years, we have gotten a lot better at it,” Rye said, citing recent disasters. “Unfortunately, I’m not going to sit here and say that it’s under good circumstances, but we’ve gotten better at customer service.”
Crawford, who was on a local board when the 2008 Rio Ruidoso floods occurred, said he and others have been actively trying to get the bridges fixed for the last 16 years. He described the process as juggling multiple deadlines and seeking funding from varying sources, only to discover near the end of the process that one deadline or another had elapsed, meaning they’d have to start over.
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“You got to do a study on a certain cactus, and then you have to find $100,000 or more to pay somebody to come up there and do the study that legitimizes what you’re saying and gives you the ability to actually get these things done,” Crawford said. “And then by the time you get through that, well, it’s expired, or your permit has expired, and you got to ask for an extension.”
For its part, FEMA said it approved the bridges for repair back in 2008, which would have cost about $8 million back then. The village has requested multiple extensions and design changes over the years, and “provided various limitations” as it tried to fix the bridges, a spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said the village requested amendments in 2018 for bridges that would meet applicable federal requirements and then again in 2022 to reflect changes requested by a designer.
“We often see projects taking longer than expected when they involve complex construction, site conditions, and/or weather conditions,” a FEMA spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
In June 2019, members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation called on FEMA to allow an extension for the bridge projects, due to delays with weather, getting engineering and environmental assessments, and approval delays from the state and FEMA.
It’s not clear whether the bridges would have fared better in the floods this year if Ruidoso Village officials had been able to implement permanent fixes. Rye, Crawford and a FEMA spokesperson all said an engineer would be the only person who could answer that question. Rye said she believed the force of the floods this year would have destroyed any bridge in their path.
Still, Crawford noted that the three bridges that the village was able to permanently replace before this year’s floods sustained only minor damage.
“And so ergo, if we had all the bridges done, maybe they would have just had superficial damage, too,” he said.
The long saga of the six bridges has frustrated residents, including a local woman who spoke up at a recent town hall meeting and listed all the reasons she’d gotten over the years about a bridge she relies on.
“Change of administration, cost-of-living costs, people changing out – that bridge never got replaced,” said the woman, who didn’t identify herself. “Now that we’ve got other bridges damaged again, are we going to take this long to get these bridges replaced?”
State calls on FEMA to allow upgrades to bridges
FEMA officials are now reviewing a request from the state that could finally fix the bridges and do so in a way that might prevent more damaging floods.
Rye wrote a request to FEMA headquarters Aug. 22 saying that the two floods 16 years apart have put the village and its residents in a “predicament.” If the bridges were repaired based on the 2008 scope of work, they would not be well-suited to the types and strength of floods the area is expecting in the next few years.
“The 2024 event has caused significant changes to the channels as compared to the original damage resulting from the 2008 event. Locals are now in a predicament, because if they construct the bridges to address only the damage from the 2008 event, the bridges will physically be unable to address the span of the channel and the nature of new and repetitive impacts.”
The new bridges will likely need to be longer, taller and have open spans underneath instead of concrete box culverts, which catch debris and cause river backups that spill over roads and cause floods, Rye said.
Flash floods poised to continue in disaster areas through monsoon season
The state’s letter did not provide an estimate for how much the bridges would cost to replace to adapt to today’s landscape. Rye said in an interview that another barrier is making sure FEMA’s payments reflect the sharp increase in construction costs over the last 16 years.
“We personally feel the new normal for this community is going to be 10 years worth of high impacts” from flooding, Rye said. “And we want that to be taken into account whenever the new scope of work is built for these bridges.”
She said it’s likely there will be five to seven more years of post-fire flooding and debris flow events.
The request to FEMA asks the agency to remove the 2008 projects from that 16-year-old scope of work and allow the bridges to be replaced under the 2024 disaster response.
FEMA has, so far, not approved the state’s request, according to a spokesperson, and will only do so on a “case-by-case basis.” The federal agency is now working with the village to do site inspections of the new damage, according to the statement.
Crawford said it doesn’t much matter to him whether it’s the old disaster or the new one that finally gets things moving.
“The kids that were in grade school in 2008 graduated before we got this project finished. But we haven’t quit, and we’re still saying, ‘Hello, you owe us. We’re not going away.’”
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