Rio Grande looking upstream, taken from Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge, 2:15 p.m. July 14, 2025

The “official” call: the Rio Grande went dry in the Albuquerque reach, just upstream of the city’s wastewater treatment plant (click here for the map), on Sunday evening (July 13, 2025), for only the second time in the 21st century.

“Dry” in this case has a formal definition. The thinning ribbons of water you see in the picture above, taken mid-afternoon Monday (July 14, 2025) have to break. It’s still a muddy mess; the river’s subsurface manifestation, the shallow aquifer, still has water in it, the trees (look at their lovely green!) still have access to that part of the river. But if you’re a fish or a turtle, these are sad times.

The fact package

We got an excellent update on river conditions (as we do every month) at the meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, the government agency responsible for river flood control, drainage, and irrigation in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. Most of what follows I learned by attending that meeting.

The last time the river dried in the heart of New Mexico’s largest city was 2022. Before that, it hadn’t happened since the 1980s.

Drying is common to the south, between Albuquerque and Elephant Butte Reservoir. Happens most every year. What’s new is drying in the heart of this large urban area.

Imported Colorado River water, via the San Juan-Chama Project, delayed the Albuquerque drying. The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District used that water to supplement flows and get water to irrigators from June 16 to July 6, when their San Juan-Chama supplies ran out. (Source: Anne Marken’s report to the MRGCD board)

The Conservancy District is currently operating under the rules of “prior and paramount” operations, meaning a subset of the lands of the valley’s six Native American Pueblos get water, while all non-Indian irrigators upstream of Isleta Pueblo are being curtailed. (Source: Marken, if you wanna understand what’s happening on the Rio Grande, you can do no better than Anne’s monthly report to the board)

As of July 8, the federal government had ~31,545 acre feet of P&P water in storage in El Vado (there’s a bit of space available despite the dam’s problems) and Abiquiu. (Source: USBR report to the MRGCD board)

Downstream from Isleta, once the Pueblos have gotten their P&P water, some irrigation is possible using return flows. Because of the structure of the plumbing, this favors the river’s east side communities. (Source: Matt Martinez report to the MRGCD board, ditto what I said about Marken: “If you wanna understand….”)

The pumps that have kept water flowing to Corrales in the absence of the rickety old siphon that used to get water there were shut down June 26. (Source: Matt Martinez)

Current flow at the Central Avenue Bridge, as measured by the USGS: is it even worth trying to measure this? What does “1.78 cubic feet per second” mean in a river like the one you see in the picture above?