The Albuquerque Hurricane

On the radio this morning, they were comparing the Friday storm in Albuquerque to a hurricane, though the high winds were not sustained long enough for there to be any "official" determination that it actually was a hurricane.

Wait. How far is Albuquerque from the ocean? Let's see. Albuquerque to Santa Monica Beach: 806 miles via (what's left of) Route 66. Albuquerque to (say) Corpus Christi: 890 miles. In other words, Albuquerque is nowhere near an ocean, no matter how you figure distances.

A hurricane in the middle of the continent, along the Rio Grande Rift Valley? Has anybody heard of such a thing before?

No. Actually not. No one has heard of such a thing, and the weather service was both surprised and perplexed. They still haven't figured out exactly what happened, though the news video below attempts to describe it.



A number of local storms coalesced over the Rio Grande and proceeded along the river valley at a brisk but rather stately pace, dumping huge amounts of rainfall. The winds blew at near-hurricane speeds at least briefly.

Damage was much more extensive than initially reported or believed. Thousands of people were caught out in the open at concerts at the Biopark Zoo and at the Isleta Casino Amphitheatre and at the baseball game about to begin at the Isotopes Park. The video at the top of this post is of a few seconds of the storm at the Biopark Zoo.

There was extensive flooding throughout the Rio Grande Valley. Corrales was particularly hard hit when rivers of mud cascaded through the village leaving huge mounds of sand and mud in people's yards, on village streets, and in practically every exposed corner of an ordinarily placid and very expensive semi-rural enclave in the Albuquerque metro area.

Out here in the Estancia Valley, the rains came after the storm in Albuquerque had passed down the Rio Grande Valley into Los Lunas and Belen and points south. The rain was hard and steady here, but there was high wind only at the outset of the storm; later on, there was a steady wind from the north, maybe 25-30 miles an hour. The rains lasted for hours here, though the storm was over in a little more than an hour in Albuquerque.

There have been a number of "microburst" events in Albuquerque and around the area during this monsoon season. There has been a lot of damage because of them -- downed trees and power lines mostly -- but Friday's storm was orders of magnitude worse. No one had ever seen anything like it.

What I noticed while watching the storm coverage on the teevee as it happened was that the worst of the storm was staying quite closely along the Rio Grande. I've never seen a storm follow a river valley so closely, though when it got closer to Socorro it spread out -- the Rio Grande Rift Valley spreads out in the vicinity of Socorro and points south.

Many people are ambivalent about this weather. First, there is a welcoming of the rain, for it is desperately needed, even in the giant amounts that have been falling lately. Better to have it than not. The storm damage is no fun, of course, but even that is tolerable in reasonable amounts. People are used to cleaning up and making repairs after storms.

Rain, Glorious Rain; or Too Much of a Good Thing

We went up to Cuba yesterday for lunch -- a 230 mile round trip to be sure, but it is one of the most scenic drives in New Mexico, among so many scenic drives, and the weather was beautiful for such an adventure.

We saw dark clouds gathering on the Jemez Mountains, and we could locate where the rain was falling in the draws and ravines and side canyons. There was none near the road or our destinations, but parts of the high ramparts of the mountains looked to be getting well soaked. Good. Cut down on the fires, break some of the drought.

When we got back to Albuquerque in the afternoon, the sky in the north was still very dark, but the storm, if that's what it was, seemed to be stationary. We stopped at the Sandia Casino to look around and play a bit -- we hadn't been there since its expansion more than ten years ago (I think) -- and when we chatted with some of the staff, they said there had been torrential rains in the late afternoon, early evening for days, and they were worried it would happen again. Little did they -- or we -- know.

Out in the Estancia Valley, we'd been getting a little bit of light rain now and again, but nothing memorable since the first day of monsoon rain on June 30. There was rain every day for about 2 weeks, then scattered infrequent showers except along the mountain sides where the rains were sometimes measured in inches per hour -- or seemed to be. We didn't realize the rains had been so severe or so frequent in Albuquerque lately.

When we left the casino around 5:30pm or so, the sky was pretty dark in the north, and there appeared to be some showers falling on the Sandias, but not a lot and not extensively. As we drove along Tramway there was no rain at all, and it was dry going through the Tijeras Canyon. The clouds in the east were lit up gloriously by the early evening sun, just beautiful piles and piles of brilliant white, like the fanciest vanilla ice cream scoops in the sky.

After we got back to our place, we did our usual futzing about, and I said I'd go into town (locally) to pick up mail (we don't have home delivery) and rustle up some grub for dinner at the rib joint. When I got there, the place was hopping. It was after all Friday Night Cruise Night, and we were on Route 66 in summer time, so what do you expect?  Nice cars! Big line for ribs and chicken and stuff, so I had a fairly long wait. Checked out the vehicles, chatted with neighbors and other folks, and all of us watched the darkening skies in the north. Deep, deep dark grays and purples lit here and there with pink and orange fringes from the setting sun, and now and then flashes of silver from the lightning inside the clouds.

"Oh shit. This is going to be a bad one," someone said out on the patio. "Nah, ya think? Really?"

"Yah, look a that," pointing to the massive black cloud looming ever closer. "It's gonna be hell."

"Nah, we'll be lucky if it drops anything."

"Just you wait. I say, take cover, and better get these cars under wraps, too."

The Storm

No Name Storm of 1991

Hurricane Sandy will be known simply as The Storm for some time to come. I haven't been able to check the news very thoroughly or very often so I don't know very much about what has been going on along the East Coast, but there are plenty of lessons for the rest of us.

The statistics of loss, damage and destruction are not really the important thing to those who are affected by these events, and hurricanes are not the only events that give rise to the lessons I'm thinking of. How many people and animals are lost and injured, how much property damage there has been, how long it takes to get things back in some kind of order... these are all matters that become abstractions at the individual and family level of people trying to adjust and survive in the midst of chaos and greater or lesser disruption.

The trauma is really what affects the people who live through these events. I remember, for example, how traumatized my mother was by the 1925 earthquake in Santa Barbara. She was a teen-ager at the time, and apparently her mother was trapped for a while in a collapsed building. My mother didn't know where her mother was, though, and she was terrified. The trauma never left her for the rest of her life. It was obvious in her eyes when she told me about it decades later.

It seems that most of those who lived through the wrath of The Storm this time did not actually suffer loss -- apart from, perhaps, some inconvenience of some sort. Many are apparently taking it in stride, in part because they are OK and everyone they know is OK. They have what they need and are able to carry on well enough in the midst of the chaos.

But there are so many others who can't. Their routine is completely disrupted. Perhaps they have no home any more. Their treasured things are gone. They've lost loved ones. They can't find their pets. Their clothes are ruined or they can't get to their jobs. They're out of food and water. On and on. The disruption and the loss from The Storm -- or from any stupendous event -- can be overwhelming.

Unfortunately, there are too many people who seek their own advantage at the expense of the victims who are overwhelmed by the disruption and loss others have experienced. These are the carrion feeders and predators who are always among us. They look forward to seeing others in such distress or so overwhelmed, they make easy prey.

We saw this horrifyingly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- which doesn't seem so very long ago now. Whether we will see it in the aftermath of Sandy remains to be seen, but from a distance the mood and the spirit seems to be quite different. Well, except for a certain smirking former Massachusetts governor who decides to collect food at campaign events in Ohio -- food which none of the helping agencies want or need. The sight of it is stomach churning.

Meanwhile for those who have "lost everything and who are trying to pick up the pieces," the legacy of The Storm will last the rest of their lives. Most of that legacy is trauma and loss, but some of it-- the survival part of that legacy -- is the chance for something new. Not everyone can handle or wants that. But those who can and do may find the legacy of The Storm to be energizing.

I just hope that those who have lost loved ones, homes, livelihoods, ways of life and so on are not further victimized -- as many of the survivors of Katrina were -- by predators and carrion feeders, such as that smirking doofus. Things are tough enough for them already.