Thursday, July 24, 2008

Crews Work Long Hours To Clean Area After Storm

By Jeff Proctor
Journal Staff Writer
      About ten New Mexico Department of Transportation workers were still on the job Wednesday evening, cleaning up the mess of mud, debris and water left along Rio Bravo between Broadway and Interstate 25 by a short burst of monsoon rains from the night before, officials said.
    The deluge left several South Valley streets awash — closing several — flooded a business on Broadway SE and had Bernalillo County and state crews scrambling to reopen roads, officials said.
    And it all happened pretty quickly.
    At the Albuquerque International Sunport, the city's officials weather gauge, 1.18 inches fell Tuesday evening, meteorologist Todd Shoemake said. Nearly all of that, which was the highest rainfall total citywide, came during a 23-minute span between 8:13 p.m. and 8:36 p.m.
    Other South Valley totals, Shoemake said, included an even inch at Gun Club and Isleta SW and 0.56 inches at Rio Bravo and Isleta SW.
    The rain wreaked a fair amount of havoc in the area, officials said.
    County officials received a call from a woman saying her business at 4201 Broadway SE had "taken on a lot of water," said Tom Zdunek, deputy county manager for public works. He had no further information, and no one from the business could be reached.
    Most of the problems came in the form of "earthen debris" and fast-moving water, which flooded streets and caused many of them to be closed for four or five hours, said Phil Gallegos, district spokesman for the state Highway Department.
    The northbound on-ramp from Rio Bravo onto I-25 was closed from about 8 p.m. to almost 1 a.m., Gallegos said, while crews using front-end loaders scraped away mud and debris. Stretches of Rio Bravo west of the freeway also were closed for various lengths of time.
    Zdunek said several side roads off Broadway also had to be closed; many of them didn't reopen until midnight.
    Most of the debris, Gallegos said, came courtesy of two sources:
    The new University Boulevard extension sent earth and water downhill into storm drain inlets and caused water to flow over the streets instead of through culverts.
    And a berm built to retain water on a construction site in the southwest quadrant of I-25 and Rio Bravo near the railroad tracks was breached by rain water, causing mud and water to flow onto Broadway.
    County crews were hard at work until after midnight, Zdunek said. State crews left the South Valley some time around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, and were back on the site from early Wednesday until around 5 p.m., Gallegos said.
   

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