ALBUQUERQUE – Much of central and western New Mexico were under a flash-flood watch Monday as several communities cleaned up after severe weather brought heavy rains and damaging floods over the past week.
The latest flood watch covers more than 36,000 square miles from Albuquerque west to Gallup and north to Los Alamos and Taos. The National Weather Service says more than 1 million people live in the area, and it includes more than a dozen airports and hundreds of miles of interstates and railroad tracks.
State emergency management officials have been keeping a close eye on weather forecasts and have been in contact with counties that have been hit the hardest in recent days, including Taos, Rio Arriba and Sandoval.
Last week, heavy rain brought flooding to towns in eastern New Mexico and Albuquerque, where city workers have cleaned up most of the mess, but they are still adding up the costs and bracing for the next round of showers.
Michael Riordan, director of the Albuquerque’s municipal development department, estimated damage at between $300,000 and $400,000. He said it could have been much worse had the city not made improvements to ponds, storm drains and pumping equipment.
“This last storm really stressed that system out, but it showed that it worked, and we saved about 5.5 million gallons of stormwater that would have otherwise gone into the neighborhoods of Martineztown and Santa Barbara,” Riordan said.
In Algodones, just north of Albuquerque, rain caused a ditch to overflow and flood neighborhoods. Sandoval County officials on Monday unanimously approved an emergency declaration, allowing the county to apply for federal disaster funding.
Estevan Lujan, a spokesman with the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said if the damage reports start to add up with continued rain and flooding, there’s always the possibility that Gov. Susana Martinez could declare a statewide emergency.
