Will we be ready for next big storm?
The big rain storm in Santa Fe on July 23 produced rivers of runoff and a flood of community impacts and reactions. Measurements varied across the city, with some totals exceeding 3 inches. Weather forecasters told
The New Mexican that it might have been a 1,000-year storm, but Santa Fe’s 150-plus years of records document similar rainstorms of 3.23 inches on Aug. 17, 1855, and 3.61 inches July 27, 1968. Three similar events over 150 years suggest that storms of this magnitude occur about every 50 years on average. These large storms will happen again. When they do, will we be ready?
How convenient it is that the city is preparing a new stormwater management plan (“A crisis of opportunity,” Aug. 9). To be effective, this new city plan must synthesize input from a broad range of qualified scientific experts, including hydrologists and geomorphologists, not only engineers. Moreover, stormwater does not respect political boundaries, so it would be better for the city and county to collaborate on a joint stormwater management plan.
The Santa Fe River provides an obvious rationale for such a joint effort. Failure of the county’s recent effort to restore the Santa Fe River downstream of Frenchy’s Field has been attributed to the magnitude of the July 23 storm and resulting high river flow, but we now know that storm and flow were not particularly unusual. Instead, the heavily engineered design of the county’s river “restoration” was a disaster waiting to happen because it failed to follow basic hydrologic and geomorphic principles.
One need only look upstream to the city’s restored river reaches, which, though damaged during the July storm, remained largely intact. The city’s effort retained deep-rooted natural vegetation and incorporated wellproven hydrologic structures that held up much better than the recent county project. An interdisciplinary city-county planning and review team could have warned the county that mature, deep-rooted plants help keep a river’s banks and bluffs intact during small or large flows and that ripping out nearly all bed and bank vegetation would have devastating, destabilizing results.
Additionally, a glance below Siler Road shows the river’s natural meander pattern, which will resist engineering efforts at control. The county should have known that the unnatural rocklined scalloped banks and other aesthetic features of its restoration served no hydrologic purpose and were poised to be quickly overrun or undermined. The city and county should seize this opportunity to rethink stormwater management, including the Frenchy’s Field to Siler Road restoration project, and build a joint stormwater management system that can accommodate the magnitude of storms that are a normal part of our hydrologic cycle.
One action we can take as a community is to implement a tax on impermeable surfaces to incentivize property owners to reduce thunderstorm runoff and to help fund green-scaping in public spaces. A city-county collaborative effort would undoubtedly come up with additional positive actions.
The city and county should seize this opportunity to rethink stormwater management. …