Last week, as rain and high winds lashed the southwest, Farmington residents started getting evacuation notices on their phones as early as Wednesday night.
“My sister was notified on Thursday that she had to get out,” said Connie Gooch, who has lived in Farmington for more than 65 years.
Gooch’s sister owns a house in a suburban neighborhood near the San Juan River.
“Every year she goes through this,” Gooch said. “The river starts rising, and she starts making sandbags to put around. But this year it was so fast she didn’t have time to do that.”
According to National Weather Service data from a river gauge in Farmington, the San Juan grew 13 times larger in just 36 hours, late last week. In the wee hours of Thursday morning, the river was about 3.5 feet high. By Friday, it was 14 feet high, flooding neighborhoods across the city and breaking historic records.
With the San Juan’s headwaters mostly contained by Navajo Dam, the flood surges in Farmington came from two normally dry tributaries upstream — Gobernador Canyon and Cañon Largo.
“This is a catastrophic flood of historic proportions,” said Devon Neely, San Juan County's public information officer. “This river got wider than we have ever seen it in our lifetimes.”
Neely said fire crews, police officers, National Guard, and even out-of-state swift water teams have rescued between 200 and 300 county residents.
“We have pulled people out of vehicles stuck in running washes. We have pulled people by helicopter off of rooftops,” Neely said. “We have used not only high-clearance vehicles from the National Guard, but amphibious vehicles because the water is so high. It’s been a lot.”
By Sunday, the rain had eased, river levels were falling, and some residents started returning home to assess flood damage.
Connie Gooch delivered tarps and other materials to her sister’s house.
“The river was up four feet in her house,” she said.
She found a neighborhood full of people moving furniture out of their homes and piling demolition debris in their front yards.
“There were trucks and cars all over the place,” Gooch said. “There was a guy in front of me carrying a loaded trailer full of sheet rock that they’d chipped out of somebody’s house.”
But officials want the thousands of evacuated residents to stay out for now.
“The public is anxious to get back in; we recognize that, we’re sympathetic to that,” said San Juan County Fire Chief David Vega at a public briefing Sunday. “Now that the swift water component is out of the way, that exposes a whole new set of hazards for us,” Vega added.
Public officials are concerned about hazards like raw sewage and damaged gas lines, live power lines, and the floodwater itself.
“The water is not healthy,” Vega said. “Stay out of the water. Gas, diesel, pesticides, fertilizer, these are not things that you want on your clothes.”
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham visited San Juan County on Monday.
Grisham said that the damage to infrastructure alone could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
“I hope we’re only spending 30 to 40 million (dollars),” Lujan Grisham said, responding to recovery cost estimates from San Juan County manager Mike Stark.
“We think this could be closer to between 200 and 300 million (dollars),” Lujan Grisham said. “The environmental issues and the road issues and infrastructure issues alone, really are expensive.”
Monday night, Governor Lujan Grisham released an announcement, stating that “the federal government has partially granted Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s request for an emergency declaration in response to historic flooding in northern New Mexico, as the Governor signed executive orders today making $8.25 million more in state funding available for flood response.”