My very first flash flood

Yesterday I worked at the Erna Fergusson Library:  it's 15 minutes from my home on a busy street.  The parking lot borders one of the many arroyos that snake down from the Sandia Mountains.  It's a complex engineering project, and I've been wondering how well it works.  I found out yesterday when I left work.

It had been a long day, and I spent my lunch hour trying to reach people in the HR department, so I had not gone outside.  But it was clearly as hot as it had ever been:  materials from the bookdrop radiated heat, and the solar telescopes on the patio were doing a roaring business.  (Sadly, I did not have the time to check them out, but I'm sure the program will be offered at other locations in my upcoming tenure with the Albuquerque library system.)

I sent a final e-mail, paper-clipped all the little notes and calculations, gathered up my stuff, and made tracks for the parking lot.  As I tossed my bags into the passenger seat, I glanced toward the arroyo.  Instead of the usual white cement-lined square ditch, I saw brown water, a few feet below the edge, running quickly from east to west.  A woman and a girl stood on the pedestrian bridge, looking down, and I joined them.

This was the fastest, smoothest, straightest waterflow I've ever seen:  no eddies, no backwater, no floating logs, no ducks.  The surface was littered with lines of light brown sprinkles, leaves and twigs I guessed, but it was moving too fast to know.  I looked east, and noted the entrance of the North Hahn Arroyo:  that arroyo was bone dry and a straight diagonal line in the otherwise smooth surface of the Hahn Arroyo water indicated the different depth where the two arroyos merged.

My fellow gawkers informed me that there had been a thunderstorm in the foothills, and that this was the flash flood from that storm.  Some gray-white clouds still hovered in the east, but where I stood the sky was clear, with a hot afternoon sun.  It was a little spooky, the water was so unnatural.

I drove home and didn't see any signs of storms until I reached Osuna Rd.  Then I noticed fast-drying water in gutters, and Bear Canyon's cement dams had brown water tumbling over them.  By the time I walked over from the apartment, the water was lazily trickling through gaps in the cement, and only the wet sand indicated the spate that had passed through.  Back home, the sidewalks had dried out in the few short minutes I had been gone, but the rocky gardens still held pools of water.  One of the water pipes into the parking lot dripped a few drops, and several large rocks sat in the lot:  another indication of the temporary hydropower.

When D arrived home, an hour after the floods, there was little evidence left of the event.  The air was humid, and a few clouds lingered.  And there were those rocks.

Apparently we are now officially in the monsoon season.