Few people can remember storms as bad as Monday's. This shot is from La Cienega. | Courtesy Kyle Harwood
When Tom Seibel looked out his front door Monday night onto Vitalia Street, he saw a river.
"It was about four inches from coming in our front door and stretched all the way across the street to the rear tires of those cars there," he said, pointing at his neighbors 25 yards away. Seibel figures the storm water was about a foot deep. It flooded into the converted garage he rents out as an apartment.
Tuesday morning, he was out raking mud and debris from his courtyard, driveway and front yard. Up and down his street and all over Santa Fe, neighbors were doing the same.
"It rained until two in the morning," Alyssa Jaffa said as she raked pine needles from her front yard and sidewalk. At one point, there was so much water in her back yard that her dog went to swim in it.
A massive, slow-moving storm that hit just after 7:30 pm dumped more than 3 inches of water in parts of the county, flooding roads, homes and businesses and sending rescue crews scrambling. Santa Fe County reported five swift-water rescues overnight, and the city's fire crews responded to several similar emergencies as well.
While stranded drivers and passengers were plucked from cars as flood waters raged around them, no deaths or even serious injuries had been reported as of mid-day Tuesday. Santa Fe County said emergency managers deemed 10 homes uninhabitable without significant repair. The city described a similar scenario as crews assessed damage.
Kerry Jones, meteorologist at the Albuquerque office of the National Weather Service, said volunteers from the CoCoRaHS community network reported between 1.1 inches and 3.57 inches of rain and hail fell.
The rain came on Santa Fe's fifth day in a row with temperatures above 90 degrees. Jones says juicy wet air from the southeast met a massive buildup of energy in the atmosphere from the heat wave to create the storm.
In the county, the hardest-hit areas were Tesuque and La Cienega, while in the city, downtown and areas near Frenchy's Field and Siler Road received the harshest storms.
"Depending on where you are at in the metro area of Santa Fe made a huge difference. Some areas had twice as much," Jones said. "The variability of thunderstorm rainfall during the monsoon season is extreme, and this another classic example of it."
Tuesday, people out gauging the damage called it the flood of the century or the storm of a lifetime. The county estimated it to be a 1,000-year event, especially when considering the rate at which rain fell. Overall totals recorded by the National Weather Service have not been seen in those areas since about 1997.
Crews from the city and county were out clearing roads all night. At 2 pm, Santa Fe County Manager Katherine Miller said all roads in the county were passable. City crews were still working on Lorenzo Lane, an arroyo-tracing dirt road on the historic east side, into the afternoon.
Magdalena Nero
At The Commons on Alameda just northwest across the Santa Fe River from Frenchy's Field, Deha Veet raked debris from her courtyard and scooted rocks back into the parking lot outside her gate. The coyote fence at the end of the lot closest to the river had been knocked down by the wall of water that flowed down from the hills above.
"It was an outrageous torrent," the retired horticulturalist said. "The arroyo rose from six to seven feet."
She pointed at stands of chokecherry bushes that had controlled storm flows for years. They laid on their sides, some completely uprooted. In spots, swirling storm water dug two additional feet from the sandy soil at the bottom of the arroyo.
Christian, a Santa Fean who didn't want to give his last name, spent his coffee break walking down to the river to see how flood control fared.
"I do some of that kind of work, and I wanted to see how what they did compares with what we do," he said. "They had rocks stacked up on the far side there and there are a bunch of them missing. … It's a bit of an unfair test. That was not a normal amount of water."
Throughout the night Santa Feans took to social media to post pictures and videos of rescues, water rifling down arroyos or rushing past them, turning streets into wide, shallow rivers.
The city called it an all-hands effort, as inspectors fanned out across town to assess damage and find potential trouble spots as storms promised to be a factor throughout the week. Road crews cleared culverts that seemed likely to fill again if flash flood advisories were fulfilled by evening rains once again.
City Manager Erik Litzenberg sent an email to councilors after the storm ended and circulated it to the media.
"Despite the best efforts of our people, there will be property and infrastructure damage that has to be addressed. There are already reports of some of the City facilities that have been damaged," he wrote.
At the Midtown Fire Station 5, the city handed out sandbags and sand. People there said supplies were running low within the first hour.
In the nearby business park off Siler Road, the warren of construction warehouses and auto repair shops looked as though a wall of mud had rolled down off Cerrillos Road. Pallets and trash lay in the middle of the street next to puddles that were slowly drying in the midday sun.
Across the road, city offices flooded and storm water stripped soil down to the weed barriers below. The Food Depot, Northern New Mexico's largest food bank, sustained flood damage to its warehouse, as well as to administrative parts of the building.
Debris stuck on the underside of cars there and across town, evidence of water that rose so quickly that all most people could do was watch.
The city set up a shelter with the Red Cross at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center, where the pool was closed because of flooding. No one used the facility Monday night, but the city planned to have it available once again on Tuesday.
Miller, the Santa Fe County manager, said the county will post road crews at the ready Tuesday evening. County officials said the water flowed so fast in places that it changed the natural course of arroyos, making it difficult to predict where storm flows might do the most damage.
County roads fared rather well, Miller said, with most becoming impassible only due to mud and flooding, not damage to the road surface. The county sets aside reserves for natural disasters beyond the everyday reserve funds required by the state, she said. More than $7 million is available, should it be needed.
Mindful of debris piling up in front yards, the city said it would begin special brush collection (as well as pickup of water-damaged carpet, flooring or other items) on Thursday, asking residents to call 955-6949 to arrange a pickup or to report damage. Santa Fe also has an automated alert system to notify people of emergences in their area.
The county asked that residents call 986-6200 to report damage to structures.
The Santa Fe River raged toward Cochiti Reservoir, with the biggest wave of water passing through a USGS gauge there between midnight and 1 am.
"All the heavy rain that fell in mid-evening over Santa Fe filled the Santa fe River … and that slug of water hit that gauge just shy of 2,500 cfs, which probably does not mean much until you put that in perspective," says Jones of the National Weather Service. "That gauge has been in place since 1991, and it's the third-highest ever recorded since 1991 and highest since the mid-90s."
Jones says 2006 was, for most of the area, the wettest monsoon season on record. That year, the gauge didn't get anywhere close to that.
"It's all about where the heavy rain falls. When it falls over a densely populated area, this is the impact that you get," he says. "An inch of rain is a good amount of rain but double that and triple that and you really start to get the major impacts."
