Calls for water rescues from Albuquerque arroyos have nearly doubled from last year

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – Albuquerque Fire Rescue (AFR) said the number of calls to rescue people from ditches and arroyos around Albuquerque has nearly doubled since last year. News 13 spoke with the fire department and the agency in charge of the arroyos about the concerning trend.

“The Flood Control system is very efficient, it’s designed to move water as quickly as possible,” said Kevin Troutman, executive director of the Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority (AMAFCA), “Part of the problem with that it’s not the storm on top of you that gets you, it’s the storm above you.”

“When we actually send one of these calls out, it’s probably our biggest response,” said Lt. Jason Fejer, public information officer for AFR, “When we designate a full flood channel response we’re sending 22 units.”

Emergency officials and flood video provided by AFR and AMAFCA make it clear: the arroyos in Albuquerque are no place for people to be. “We see that with the number of calls that we’ve had this year,” Fejer said. The number of water rescues so far this year is nearly double what AFR had to respond to last year. “In 2022 was what, nine of these flood channel responses that we had, 2023 we saw 17, and so far this year we’ve seen 30,” Fejer said.

Those include rescues in the Rio Grande and other places, but just in the arroyos alone they’ve been called out to rescue someone 21 times this year—up from 11 last year and just seven in 2022.

“Talking and looking at some of these numbers, a lot of the spike that we saw this year was from that big storm, the record-setting storm on June 29th,” Fejer said, “and on that day alone we had ten of these callouts in a short four hour period.”

The amount of rain we’ve gotten could also be contributing to the high number of rescue calls: so far this year, we’ve recorded five times more rain than at this point last monsoon season. Officials with the Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority have seen another trend: “We’ve seen a trend that’s shifting the number, the age of the rescues from the younger individuals to older individuals,” Troutman said.

While they’re trying to reach out to both demographics and the homeless community about the dangers of these channels, one message prevails: “Just stay out of them,” Fejer said.

AFR said three people have died after getting caught in these arroyos so far this year. AMAFCA says the increase in rescue calls has them trying to figure out how to reach more people with their ‘Ditch the Ditches‘ campaign, as right now it is mostly targeted at school children.

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