Trying some stuff that I don’t want to do on my employer’s production server. Nothing to see here. Move along.

There’s a newsroom joke that “we don’t write about planes that don’t crash,” but I think it’s important to think carefully about societal systems that succeed, because lessons learned matter:

The flood pulse was impressive. But it is instructive to look at how much larger it would have been if not for a pair of flood control dams built in the second half of the 20th century to protect us from our habit of building our cities in flood plains. On Sept. 13, they were two dams in the right places at the right time.

Importantly, one of the lessons is that there are always tradeoffs. Flood control success did not come without cost:

Authorized by Congress in 1960 and completed in the mid-’70s, Cochiti is one of the largest and arguably the most controversial dam in New Mexico. Its completion drowned farmlands, summer homes and culturally significant sites at Cochiti Pueblo, and seepage beneath the dam waterlogged remaining pueblo farmlands downstream. In addition, the way it altered the Rio Grande’s flows has caused lasting environmental problems downstream, depriving the riverside ecosystem of natural floods.

But on Sept. 13, it did the job we gave it when we built it, which was to protect the Middle Rio Grande Valley from flooding.

From the work blog:

Corky Herkenhoff, who’s been farming at San Acacia for half a century, told me he can tell where the runoff is coming from by the smell. San Acacia sits just below the Rio Puerco and Rio Salado, two generally dry tributaries that have been pumping water into the Rio Grande over the last week. Herkenhoff said he can tell the difference. “You can tell when the Rio Puerco comes in, and you can tell when the Rio Salado comes in,” he said.

In the midst of a very unusual storm (see my newspaper explanation of its unusualness here), I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours watching a big slug of water make its way down the Rio Grande Valley in which Albuquerque sits. A source yesterday afternoon pointed me to the readings on the USGS San Felipe gauge, which had popped up over 9,000 cubic feet per second. For this spot on this river, upstream from Albuquerque, that is a lot of water. We quickly committed journalism, the water managers rallied their modelers and calculated estimated peak flows and arrival times, the municipal authorities went into hyperdrive. And then we waited.

This was not a “wall of water” type of flow, but as modeled, it was likely to be up near the largest flow we’ve had in Albuquerque in the post-dam era. So we staked out the bridges, as did a hoard horde of residents, to watch our briefly big river roll past. (My colleague Rob Browman illustrated this part nicely.)

After work, Lissa and I went out in the pitch dark so she could see it, and then I spent today following the pig in the python downstream. It’s a slow-moving, easy-to-track thing: midnight at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue bridge, noon today at Los Lunas south of here, rising as I write this at Bosque, the gauge in the far southern end of Valencia County.

The thing that was hard to capture was the quiet nature of the event. We think of “floods” as tempestuous, but as I wrote this morning, one of the reasons the flow was less than expected is the way the river spread gently into the woods alongside its main channel. Upstream, the river has been incising into its old flood plain, so the spreading is only possible in places where human intervention, in the form of habitat restoration, has created low areas, swales and side channels for endangered critters. To the south, the river made it out of its banks on its own.

I am not a photojournalist, but I’m trying to learn how to take pictures that tell stories. Here’s one attempt, a cottonwood in a normally dry bosque forest with a soft blanket of water at its feet:

Quiet water in the cottonwood bosque, John Fleck, 9/14/2013