Catch it, pump it.

Most of Greater Downtown (Albuquerque) sits below the level of the Rio Grande, like a sort of high-desert New Orleans. Any rain that falls between the river’s east-bank levee and roughly Broadway will stay in the area until it evaporates, gets absorbed into the ground, or is otherwise dealt with.

– Downtown Albuquerque News

DAN had a great pair of stories yesterday and today about the network of pumps required to manage storm water in Albuquerque’s greater downtown.

The quote above is true, in that for more than a century we have tried to pin the Rio Grande down on one side of the valley, building levees to confine the river to a narrow strip down the west side of the valley floor through the metro area.

But it might be equally true (though less helpful in a practical sense) to say that we built what would become downtown Albuquerque back in 1880 in the bed of the river, and we have spent the next century-and-a-half trying to keep the river out of said bed. We build levees, we build culverts, we build pumps, we build pipes. Because rivers are nothing if not persistent. This responsibility is ongoing.

This morning’s bike ride/walk took me down through the old Martineztown neighborhood to see the recently completed city storm water pump station #31. We dug a big hole to catch water from big rainstorms, and a pump station to lift that water up and out of the neighborhoods – “otherwise dealt with,” as DAN so charmingly put it.

The traffic chaos while this construction was going on was a delight. This was a big project – a great example of the permanent job we humans take on when we engineer a river.

Riding a bike or walking (the way I did it this morning) is a great way to get a feel for what’s going on here. Martineztown was built on the sand hills, just up out of the flood plain. Walking a thousand feet from the heart of Martineztown to pump station #31 this morning, I dropped ~10 feet in elevation.

Rivers are the sum of each raindrop and melting snowflake, heading downhill, gathering in community, seeking the low spot or, perhaps more accurately, creating the low spot. The rain/snow collective sometimes picks up sediment along the way, sometimes drops sediment along the way, making its own world in the process – making a river.

The indigenous Pueblo people who have been here from time immemorial, and the Spanish who collided with them beginning in the 1500s, generally adapted to that by building in the high spots. That’s why Martineztown is 10 feet higher, and the old Spanish village of Albuquerque was on high ground over on the west side of the valley bottom, near the river’s modern channel.

In the 1700s, the land in between was swampy river bottom, filling with water during high flows from summer melt, or the raging summer downpours. Until Manuel Martín and his family moved there in the 1850s, the place we now know as Martineztown was high ground used for sheep grazing.

Beginning in the 1880s, we (I say “we” because we are the carriers of this bit of history, we can’t avoid owning this) started building a modern city where the rain/snow collective, the Rio Grande, wanted to go, the part between Martineztown and what came to be known as “Old Town” on the high ground near the river.

I say this without judgment. Albuquerque is a wonderful city. But we now own the responsibility that comes with that choice. So we build pumps.