No great protection

Albuquerque's levees riddled by animal burrows and tree roots.

The decades-old thick earthen levees that prevent the Rio Grande from flooding Albuquerque need to be rebuilt. (Photo By Joel Gay)

ALBUQUERQUE -- The thick earthen levees that were built decades ago to prevent the Rio Grande from flooding into Albuquerque are so old and in such poor condition that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says they need to be rebuilt. The estimated cost to local and federal taxpayers: $120 million.

One particularly weak stretch of levee in the South Valley will be replaced this year, but the rest of the work will have to wait for congressional funding.

And depending on how long it takes, riverside property owners could be forced in the meantime to buy flood insurance costing up to several thousand dollars a year.

In the 1950s the federal government invested heavily in flood-control projects along the Rio Grande — some $91 million worth of dams, diversion channels and levees. Adjusting for inflation, that same work today would cost nearly $800 billion.

The levees were designed and built at a time when the Rio Grande still occasionally ran bank to bank, swelled by snowmelt from southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. In planning the 30 miles of levees, which stretch from Alameda to the far South Valley, the corps estimated the worst-case flooding scenario, then built the berms another 3 feet higher, said Fritz Blake, the agency's project manager in Albuquerque.

Since then, Cochiti Dam was built about 30 miles north of the city to capture the sudden spring runoff and release it gradually. While the levees were designed to handle a flood of 42,000 cfs (cubic feet per second), the Corps of Engineers now limits the flow out of Cochiti Dam to less than 10,000 cfs.

So what's the problem?

Muskrats, elm trees and Katrina, to name a few.

The corps discovered while doing other work in 2004 that the levees' condition had deteriorated over the course of 50 years, Blake said. Animal burrows and tree roots had riddled the berms with tunnels. Drains designed to keep the levee dirt dry were plugged up and not working. Erosion threatened some of the levees from the back side.

Then Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. The Corps of Engineers was roundly criticized when some of its levees there failed, and afterward the agency quickly revised upward its technical standards for levee construction.

Albuquerque's levees "still afford a high degree of protection," according to a Corps of Engineers report issued in January, "(but) it is unknown how long this will last, given their rate of decline."

Rebuilding them was estimated at $120 million in 2007, but the cost of doing nothing could be more than 10 times higher. The corps report estimates that $1.4 billion worth of property is at risk if the levees fail.

But funding looks likely to come in spurts rather than a flood. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, has asked not for $120 million, but for $6 million in next year's water and energy appropriations bill to pay for a specific levee project in Albuquerque's North Valley. And getting even that much will be a challenge, said spokeswoman Maria Najera.

"We're hoping to get this (passed) during this session of Congress," but there are two big hurdles, she said. The first is to get the Senate Appropriations Committee to earmark the money for a specific project — the so-called Montano Gap on the west side of the river where no levee was ever built before. The second is a veto threat from President Bush.

The appropriation may have to wait until the next president takes office before it is signed, Najera said. And of course, depending on who the next president is and what the budget looks like, there's no guarantee it will be signed.

Though the corps report suggests that the levees are not likely to fail in the near future, there could also be a substantial cost to homeowners if nothing is done.

The levees eliminate the need for flood insurance, but the levees must first be certified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The agency visits flood-prone areas every 10 years or so, and on its next visit FEMA could refuse to certify all or part of Albuquerque's levee system, putting perhaps thousands of homes and businesses in a high-risk flood plain. Banks holding mortgages could then require flood insurance. 

That happened recently in Albuquerque's South Valley, said Blake. FEMA couldn't certify one stretch of levee because there was no record that it had been built to even 1950s standards, much less those of 2008, he said.

"If you can't certify a levee, FEMA says it's now in the flood plain," Blake said.

The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority and Bernalillo County scrambled to find $6 million to reconstruct the levee, Blake said. The Corps of Engineers will eventually reimburse the agencies for 75 percent of the construction cost, but local taxpayers are on the hook for the rest.

If the remaining levees lost their certification, the sudden need for flood insurance would be a financial shock to people all along the river, said Farmers Insurance agent Jo Ann Medina, of the Medina Agency. The bare minimum would probably cost around $500 a year, she said, and she recently got a flood insurance quote of $4,000 per year for a Los Lunas homeowner in the flood plain there.

"It prices people out of their homes sometimes," Medina said.

Ironically, while the Corps of Engineers doesn't have the money to rebuild levees in Albuquerque, it is hard at work in Iraq. The agency's Gulf Region Division has $13.4 billion of projects in the war-torn nation, from repairing the electrical and drinking water infrastructure to building schools and health clinics.

The South Valley levee work is scheduled to begin in August.

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