Tempestuous, destructive winds struck first.
Then, the largest wildfire in New Mexico history.
Now, incessant monsoon rains have unleashed deadly floods.
There are probably few people in New Mexico who’ve seen such extremes in such little time, but for residents like Danette Lucero, misfortune has become a way of life.
“It’s been one disaster after another,” said Lucero, 63. “They say God only gives you on your plate what you can handle, and mine’s pretty damn full.”
Flooding was expected, but daily downpours in a state defeated by drought were not. And while everyone warned those in the burn scar left behind by the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire that flooding would be a problem in San Miguel and Mora counties, the never-ending rain has turned the area into a dangerous mud and debris bath — with death and destruction now as frightening as the fire itself.
Last week, three people — Jimmy Chris Cummings and his wife, Linda Jane, both 62, and her mother, 84-year-old Betty Greenhaw — died when they were swept away by fast-moving floodwaters in Tecolote Canyon, northwest of Las Vegas , NM
Isidro Archuleta, 58, who lives in the community of Cleveland, fears he might be the next casualty.
“Last night, I thought I was going to have a heart attack,” Archuleta said Friday morning.
“My house is taking water. The roads are completely gone. Me and my wife are sick — we’re on oxygen. It’s just getting worse and worse by the day,” he said.
Archuleta, 58, and his wife, Jennifer, who have been living as prisoners of their own home after flooding washed out their road in Mora County, said a massive rainstorm was over their home Friday afternoon.
“There’s like waterfalls coming down the ridges y todo, just pounding us, pounding us,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much water in my life up here, and there’s nothing to hold the water back. There’s nothing.”
Isidro Archuleta, a self-described retired cowboy who used to work with explosives in gold mines, had reached out to county officials earlier in the day. He said they promised to send help their way.
But the Archuletas, who had packed up a few belongings and were waiting for help to arrive, were worried about their animals, which include 11 llamas, three of which recently gave birth.
“They’re living on ash,” Jennifer Archuleta said.
The Archuletas were rescued and transported off the mountain one by one in an all-terrain vehicle Friday afternoon, Isidro Archuleta said.
When he called 911 to ask for help, Isidro Archuleta said the dispatcher was unsympathetic.
“She said, ‘We’ll see what we can do.’ Before that, she knew me, ‘You people what you were getting into,’ ” Archuleta said before cursing the dispatcher in Spanish.
The sky is falling
Ivan Molinar, a San Miguel County employee, was clearing a culvert Thursday that had become plugged with debris and was flooding County Road A3A. He said residents affected by the wildfire can’t seem to catch a break.
“It’s like waiting for what’s going to happen next,” he said. “That’s exactly what it is. You don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
Molinar said county crews had already cleared the culvert he was working on twice before.
“We go mend fences, and it’s like we don’t do nothing the following day,” he said, referring to the debris buildup.
“We were looking to the sky to see if anything was going to fall on us,” he said, half-joking.
Molinar, who lives in the village of Guadalupita, said firefighters saved his home, but the mountains surrounding it are completely burned.
“It’s crisp,” he said. “It’s quemado.”
His co-worker, Danny Ortiz, who lives in the community of Montezuma, blamed the US Forest Service, which started a prescribed burn that blew out of control, for the region’s bad fortune.
“We’re not cursed,” he said. “It’s the forestry that cursed us.”
On Thursday, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the Federal Emergency Management Agency had granted her request to include flooding impacts in New Mexico’s disaster declaration for counties affected by wildfires.
“This action will make additional support available for New Mexicans who have already suffered great losses this year,” the governor said in a statement. “I will keep fighting for every available measure of support for New Mexico families that have been so terribly impacted by wildfires.”
Susan Vigil, who lives in Chacon, said the government needs to do more to help residents.
“I’ve seen numerous Facebook posts where the water and the debris is almost reaching their homes and all the sandbags that they put,” she said. “The water is so deep that it’s jumping the sandbags.”
Vigil said the devastation is also taking a psychic toll.
“It’s like a person can’t even grieve or process what’s happened with the fires before another catastrophe hits,” she said. “This is major.”
‘It’s been bright’
Just ask Danette Lucero, who has been hit with one challenge after another in recent months.
“We owned our house [in Sapello] for 14 days before it burned,” she said, crying. “We settled on [April] 7 and it burned on the 22nd.”
Lucero, who served as fire chief of the local volunteer fire department for about 1½ years, said she stepped down from the position after she became sick and wound up in the emergency room.
“I’ve been in the fire [department] 10 years,” she said. “It’s just been hell. It’s been hell.”
Lucero’s sister offered her and her fiancé, Joe Romero, a fifth-wheel camper to live in after their modest cabin went up in flames. Although they considered it, they eventually declined.
“In three months, we’ll be having snow,” she said. “It’s literally hell to live at 8,500 feet in the mountains in a fifth-wheel, but at that moment we didn’t have a choice.”
Lucero said friends offered to let her and Romero stay in a log cabin just up the road from the home they lost in the fire.
“We moved here, and everything was beautiful — the cabin is beautiful,” she said, noting the irony. They had bought “a 1980s fixer-upper” and are now living in a remodeled cabin.
But the reprieve was short-lived.
While the cabin survived the fire, it is now being hit by massive flooding.
Lucero recorded video Wednesday of raging floodwaters near the stairs of the cabin. The flooding left behind a mangled mess of mud, rocks and other debris.
“Those [12-foot] beams were floating down the driveway like a leaf,” she said, pointing to wooden beams sticking out of the mud near the front of the cabin.
Wednesday marked the sixth time in about two weeks the monsoons had caused major flooding in the burn scar.
“When it started, it was just water, like leaves and stuff like that,” Lucero said. “I was right there standing between the door of the garage and the wood [pile] trying to get it to go when I could hear all this rock coming, big trees, and I went, ‘Eh, it’s time to get the hell out of Dodge.’ ”
The five previous floods lasted 15 to 20 minutes, she said.
“This flood lasted three hours, and it just kept getting worse and worse,” she said. “Every time it comes down, it gets worse.”
Although she isn’t too worried what snowstorms will bring with winter approaching, Lucero said communities in the burn scar will have to deal with other challenges in the future.
“You know the worst part, bro, is now all the land grabbers are after all the elderly, people that don’t have funds to rebuild, especially the people on the river because of their water rights,” she said. “Now we’re scared the government and the big shots out of Texas are going to start buying up [the land] and now we’re going to become a Breckenridge [Colo.] because of our ski area in Sipapu.”
Determined to recover
Paula Garcia, a Mora resident who is executive director of the New Mexico Acequia Association, said she and her sister jokingly ask what area residents did to deserve such unpleasantness.
“Setting that dark humor aside, all I can think is that these communities are the ones who could least afford these kinds of disasters,” she said. “I feel like people who live in these rural communities — it’s beautiful and we live here and we live here by choice — but I also think of it as one of the last places where you can make it as a poor family or where you can eke out a living from the land if you’re very resourceful, and people here are very resourceful.”
Despite their fortitude, there’s only so many residents can deal with, she said.
“To lose so much forest and now to see our acequias blown out and to see our fields covered with black ash, I just think, ‘Wow. How much more can the people bear?’ she said.
But people are determined to recover, Garcia said.
“Everybody I talk to says, ‘Where do I get help? What can I do?’ And in a lot of cases, they’re just getting out there with their own palas [shovels] because what else are they doing to do?” she said.
“They’re getting out there with their own equipment, with their own palas and saying, ‘Well, it looks like we might be on our own.’ … In the end, it’s really the tenacity of the people that’s going to keep these communities alive.”
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