OK, this was just fun:

Absent a really giant floating rubber ducky, the Rail Runner bridge across Albuquerque’s main flood control channel appears to be safe.

“The thing about water that people don’t understand is that it is so powerful,” said Adrienne Martinez as she stood over water rushing beneath a scale model of the flood control channel and the Rail Runner bridge. The bridge held, intact, against a simulated flood flow larger than anything nature has yet provided since the Albuquerque system was built in the 1970s.

Until Martinez released the rubber duckies into the channel. Wham! The little toy Rail Runner train was in the drink.

“And that’s what would happen if we had really big ducks,” Martinez said with a smile.

Here’s a picture I took last July when the flood diversion channel beneath the railroad bridge was running high:

Water 10 feet deep beneath the Rail Runner bridge, July 19, 2013, by John Fleck