Because all they know for certain is that more rain is coming, and their town — and especially, their street — will probably flood again. And again.
“A never-ending nightmare,” said Smith, 45.
Ruidoso, a scenic town of nearly 8,000 in southern New Mexico, is now at the mercy of an enduring, double-barreled disaster. Two massive fires broke out last month along the mountains encircling the town, torching more than 25,000 acres, burning nearly a thousand homes and killing two people. Then, eight times and counting since June 21, including Saturday, floodwaters have cascaded down those same mountainsides into the village.
It’s a worst-case scenario that may become more frequent as weather extremes intensify in the American West. Studies suggest climate change is increasing the risk that severe rainfall comes in the wake of wildfires. Increasingly hot and dry conditions breed fiercer blazes. Warming air can also hold more moisture, leading to more intense storms. The burn scars from fires can elevate the flooding risk for more than five years, as vegetation regrows.
And while there have been other examples of that one-two, fire-water punch — most notably, deadly 2018 mudslides near Santa Barbara, Calif., soon after a massive fire — experts say Ruidoso and its topography are at particular risk.
The fires in June sheared hillsides of their evergreen trees and shrubs and even altered the composition of the soil, dramatically reducing its ability to absorb rainfall. Andrew Mangham, a National Weather Service hydrologist, said it was as if giant plastic sheets had been draped on the mountains, then covered with ash and tree trunks that would tumble down at the slightest invitation. The blazes came just in time for the state’s monsoon season — and suddenly even normal rainstorms could produce supercharged flash floods.
“The best way to describe it is, this town is sitting at the bottom of a bowl. And the sides of the bowl have burned,” said Mangham, who was dispatched from Albuquerque to Ruidoso to help guide the response. “So everything that runs off is pointing right to the heart of town.”
When rains have come, floodwaters tumble downslope and into town as soon as 30 minutes later. The water — along with all the debris in its churn — has charged through homes, leveling front doors and leaving exit wounds in the back. It has flung cars into trees and tossed propane tanks like tumbleweeds. It has shorn asphalt from roads and dumped unfathomable amounts of mud. It damaged more than 200 homes that had been spared from the fire. And it’s left the people in Ruidoso in a jittery cycle — checking weather patterns, waiting for emergency alerts and trying to figure out what to do with homes that have become dangerous.
“This town is in survival mode, literally,” said Dana Schenk, who owns several flood-damaged vacation properties in a town whose economy depends heavily on tourism. She and her husband spent several thousand dollars on cleanup after a flood on June 29 — one of the largest — renting heavy equipment and laying down new gravel. A subsequent flood, on July 9, obliterated that work.
The people living in Ruidoso are not so much cleaning up as preparing for the next inundation. Last week, homeowners and work crews were boarding up windows, erecting plywood barriers and constructing makeshift sandbag walls. Smith’s husband drove several hours out of town to obtain the military-grade containers — just one step in a do-it-yourself fortification of a home they doubt they can live in again.
Just a month earlier, that home had been the place Smith called a “slice of heaven.” A female elk routinely took refuge in their yard. Hummingbirds buzzed around the porch where Smith sipped her coffee. They had purchased the home, which had a second unit on the property, with a decades-long plan. They restored that unit into an Airbnb rental that was occupied almost every weekend. And they imagined that small home could eventually become an independent space for their 16-year-old son, who has autism and would need his parents close by.
But that unit partially flooded. And their home, though not inundated, was lashed by waters — enough that they were terrified of spending nights there. They moved in temporarily with relatives, which wasn’t easy. Smith’s son was having night terrors, soaking the sheets in sweat. Smith noticed her vision blurring from stress. The flood erased income from the rental unit and also from her business — a stall inside a now-flooded antiques mall. She spent hours each night poring through their family finances. They needed to find a place to rent. But they still needed to pay their mortgage.
“How do you live in survival mode continually? Without end?” she said.
On Wednesday morning, with the next round of storms potentially rolling in, that meant trying to prevent further property damage. Smith’s husband filled the car with sandbags and backed it up to a greenhouse belonging to a neighbor. Anything nearby could become dislodged in the next flood and damage whatever might be in its path.
“You want to stagger them like bricks,” he said, as they took turns carrying the sandbags, setting up yet another barrier.
“I guess this is what we’re doing today,” she said, and she imagined that the sandbags, too, might get flung down the road in the next flood.
Fires left just ‘tire tracks and rubble’
Ruidoso looks nothing like so much of New Mexico — no red empty spaces. It is surrounded, in normal time, by green. Many neighborhoods here smell of pine. It is a skiing and hiking town. It has a main street with stores selling outdoor gear, pottery and turquoise. It has cabin-chic A-frame houses — some vacation rentals, some for full-time residents. It’s a place where people tend to display name placards in front of their homes and, more recently, where stores have put up signs thanking first responders.
On Tuesday, one of those first responders, Police Chief Lawrence Chavez, went on a driving tour of his town, re-creating the chronology of the fire and what it wrought. The blazes — yes, there were two of them — started on June 17, and within 24 hours, they eclipsed any scenario the small town’s emergency responders had practiced for. They had long imagined a fire but not an inferno sandwiching the town. They had long imagined evacuating a particular neighborhood but not the entire population.
Chavez drove slowly through one neighborhood after the next. Low-lying areas were caked in muck. Other areas — in far-flung zones — were irreparably torched. Rooftops had become warped like gruesome sculptures. At many properties, all that still stood was a stone fireplace. In one home, the last thing standing was a dramatic staircase.
“This was a nice three-story house,” Chavez said, rolling by.
He kept repeating the same things.
“Devastating,” he said.
As he drove, he retold parts of his own experience: On the day of the fire, he ushered people out of town on the last open road. The emergency kicked off weeks in which he worked on two or three hours of sleep.
Then he turned the corner and stopped at one more home that had burned that first day: his own.
He exited the car and walked onto the lot. He pointed out the remnants of a fence he had installed. He pointed to an area that was once his porch, where just days before the fire, he celebrated his son’s and stepdaughter’s graduation parties.
“Now it’s just tire tracks and rubble,” he said.
The fire consumed his most prized possessions — his grandmother’s wedding ring, the hunting knives he’d been given by his grandfather — and on the day it was burning, he drove by, recording a wordless video he later showed to his wife that caused her to “bawl.” Chavez considered himself a hardened officer. He had dealt with many “critical incidents.” But he found himself feeling overwhelmed in the days after, coming back to the property, finding random things — a doorknob, a spring from the couch.
All he had left of his past life was the uniform he wore on the day of the fire.
Still, he said, losing possessions suddenly seemed better than the gradual undoing that comes with continual flooding. For Chavez, the total destruction had made decisions in the aftermath relatively clear-cut. There was no need to haul out muck. No need to lay sandbags. No torturous work to salvage a past life. As he got back in his car, he passed people girding for the next storm.
“All the stuff they’re doing right now,” he said, “there is a chance that by Saturday, they’ll be doing the same cleanup, with the same amount of debris.”
The wait for more floods
Mangham, the hydrologist, said more flooding is “virtually guaranteed.” Day after day last week, even the slightest chance of more rain left people tense. Officials placed cameras and gauges in the most crucial areas. Water rescue crews were on standby. From a makeshift command center stocked with snacks and energy drinks, a team of emergency responders tracked radar and looked at weather models.
Then, around 5:45 one night, the dark gray clouds rolled in over the mountains.
Minutes later, one of the officials detected lighting.
“Guys, I think we’re going to get some flooding at Eagle Creek,” Mangham said in the center, as a flash-flood warning went out, saying that a “dangerous and life-threatening situation” could be underway.
Those in the command center communicated with crews in the neighborhoods and watched the storm, pixels of green and yellow, move over the mountains. They tracked a webcam pointed at an intersection of town.
“I don’t like how it’s building,” said Eric Queller, Ruidoso’s emergency manager.
“There are probably some cells that are coming pretty hard,” Mangham said.
“Andrew, what are your gauges saying?” Queller asked.
“I’ve got 35/100 of an inch at South Fork,” he said.
Just after 8 p.m., Mangham thought he saw the first signs of potential flooding. Water was rising in a creek at the base of a canyon. But then he waited 10 minutes. And 20. The levels looked stable. By 9 p.m., even as thunder crackled, the gauges hadn’t risen. When the rain subsided, all Ruidoso had was damp ground.
Mangham predicted a shorter, more high-power storm would be more likely to produce the next flash flood — which is exactly what happened early Saturday morning, when Ruidoso experienced flood No. 7. Then, several hours later, another intense burst dropped several inches in an hour, creating the largest inundation yet: Flood No. 8.
Mangham said the rainfall earlier in the week led the way to this new round of flooding by erasing any last margin for absorption. In the Saturday afternoon flood, power lines were downed in the water. Several people were rescued by helicopter. The storm caused crews to close off bridges across town to remove debris, and officials predicted new high-water marks in many homes.
Smith had learned to ride out storms far away from her house. But she didn’t need additional flooding to arrive at her biggest decision.
Even when the regular flooding subsides and the vegetation regrows, her family won’t be living in their home near the bend in the road.
“Just the trauma of it all,” she said.
She said they’ve “already decided” to sell the house.
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