Tracy Haragan, a Ruidoso native on the verge of retirement, watched from his home as a surging river carried away the contents of nine nearby residences.
“You watched everything they owned, everything they had — everything went down,” he said.
An intense bout of monsoon rains set the disaster in motion Tuesday. Water rushed from the surrounding mountainside, overwhelming the Rio Ruidoso and taking with it a man and two children from an RV park along the river. The bodies were found downstream during search and rescue efforts.
The children — a 4-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy — had been camping with their parents when they were swept away. Their father and mother were being treated for injuries at a hospital in Texas, according to officials at Fort Bliss, where the father is stationed.
Mayor Lynn Crawford said hearts are broken over the lives lost and stomachs are in knots as residents begin to take stock of the damage.
“It is such a great town, it just takes a tail-whipping every once in a while," Haragan said. "We always survive.”
Rebuilding — again
A popular summer retreat, Ruidoso is no stranger to tragedy. It has spent a year rebuilding following destructive wildfires last summer and the flooding that followed.
Rebuilding again in Ruidoso will be hard, if not impossible, said Riverside RV Park owner Barbara Arthur.
Arthur says her guests scrambled up a nearby slope when the river started coursing through the site Tuesday afternoon. She also lost her home in flood.
It was the sixth time the river rose in the last several weeks and by far the worst, she said. And Tuesday’s rainfall was more than could be absorbed by the hillsides and canyons within a wildfire burn scar.
Setting records
The floodwaters of the Rio Ruidoso rose more than 20 feet (6 meters) on Tuesday to set a record high-water mark, said National Weather Service meteorologist Todd Shoemake in Albuquerque. That eclipsed the previously recorded high in July 2024 by nearly 5 feet (1.5 meters).
About 3.5 inches (8.9 centimeters) of rain fell over the South Fork burn scar in just an hour and a half, Crawford said. As little as a quarter of an inch (about 6 millimeters) of rain over a burn scar can cause flooding.
“They were probably already getting some runoff from upstream before it even actually started raining on top of the wildfire burn scar,” Shoemake said. “It really was just kind of a terrible coincidence of events that led to that.”
He likened the intense rainfall to a 100-year storm, which has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.
Cleanup begins
Emergency crews completed dozens of swift water rescues before the water receded Tuesday. Two National Guard teams and several local crews already were in the area when the flooding began, said Danielle Silva of the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham requested a presidential disaster declaration, tallying more than $50 million in emergency response expenditures, including water rescues, and damage to public infrastructure, including toppled bridges and washed out roadways. The estimate includes flood damage at Ruidoso and beyond from monsoon rainstorms since late June.
Ruidoso has also recently requested $100 million in federal aid to convert flood-prone private land to public property after successive years of violent flooding laid bare the dangers of an expanded flood plain.
The floods at Ruidoso came just days after flash floods in Texas killed at least 120 people and left more than 160 people missing.
Bracing for more
Local officials said the village, as the flood hit, was still in the process of replacing outdoor warning sirens destroyed in last year's wildfire and reassessing risks along the local flood plain.
Crawford reiterated Wednesday that Ruidoso will continue to be in the crosshairs with each monsoon, as there's still work to do to recover from the wildfire. The rainy season begins in June and runs through September.
The river, meanwhile, is running thick with sediment that can settle and raise future water levels.
The village’s tourism-based economy also has been thrown into turmoil again. With floodwaters running through Ruidoso Downs, one of the horse track's signature races that was scheduled to start Friday has been derailed.
The mayor said people are anxious as the monsoon is sure to bring more rain throughout the summer.
“Yesterday was a good lesson — you know, that Mother Nature is a much bigger, powerful force than we are,” he said Wednesday. “And that we can do a lot of things to protect ourselves and to try to help direct and whatever, but we cannot control.”
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Lee reported from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Bryan from Albuquerque. Associated Press writers Matt Brown in Denver and Christopher L. Keller in Albuquerque contributed to this report.
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