Museum insiders offer firsthand accounts of the flash flood that breached Roswell Museum in October—and an update on the uphill battle for remediation.
ROSWELL, NM—The night of Saturday, October 19, 2024, in the pouring rain, Roswell Museum director Caroline Brooks was driving home with her family. The water on the street got deeper and deeper, threatening to submerge the hood of the car. “I wasn’t sure if we were gonna make it,” Brooks says.
They took a detour through downtown and at around 10:30 pm Brooks could see that the Spring River was pummeling the bridge connecting the museum to the Roswell Convention Center. “It was still raining hard, and I was just like, okay, it’s gonna come into the building. There’s nothing I can do about it right now,” she says. They waved at some folks attending a quinceañera, who would soon become stranded on the rooftop of the Convention Center.
Brooks recalls feeling guilty about not being able to stop and try to reinforce the museum’s doors with sandbags. She later realized that wouldn’t have helped anyway.
The flood line in some areas reached up to nearly six feet.
Back at home, Brooks was up all night, monitoring the flood while security alerts from the museum kept pinging her phone. “The alarms had been going off at the museum since probably around midnight, because the doors were breaking, things were moving,” she says. At around 7 am, she received a call from staff members who lived near the museum. It was bad. “They’re like, ‘You have to come now.’”
The doors on the west side of the building had all breached, allowing torrents of water and mud from the Spring River to spill throughout the entire museum. Outside, the floodwaters had overturned vehicles and sent trees crashing through gates and fences.
That morning, staff worked to open the doors of the museum, turn off the utilities, and get the water draining. When it was safe to enter, they found floors plastered with silt. The flood line in some areas reached up to nearly six feet.
“The first thing we did was go to that gallery with all the paintings in it, and got the O’Keeffe, got the Stuart Davis, started getting a few [Peter] Hurds and just started taking them outside,” says Brooks. Alerts were pinging their phones again, warning of another flash flood expected in the afternoon. Luckily, the second storm surge didn’t come.
“It all became a blur after that,” Brooks trails off.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Roswell area receives, on average, about twelve inches of rain per year. A normal, cumulative amount of rain for the month of October is about one inch.
On October 19, it rained nearly six inches within the span of a few hours.
I spoke with Roswell City Manager Chad Cole in early December about the citywide flood impacts. Unlike larger cities with more storm-drain infrastructure, he says, “Our streets are essentially our storm drains. We’re just not built for that kind of water in that amount of time.”
The levee at the Two Rivers Dam and Reservoir to the west of the city, locally known as the “Twin Dam,” which was completed in 1963 and designed to protect Roswell and the surrounding area from floods, simply couldn’t hold that amount of water all at once. One side had a floodgate, the other did not, and the water surged over the top of the dam and surpassed the river banks of the Rio Hondo and the Rocky Arroyo River. The smaller Spring River, which flows past the Roswell Museum down a concrete channel about eighteen feet deep, joins the Rio Hondo just east of the city and was quickly overflowing. The flooding impacts were widespread.
Our alley was a river, our backyard was a lake.
“Our alley was a river, our backyard was a lake, and it breached the back doors of our home,” says Cole, describing the situation at his house after the flood. “It was a real mess. I’ve never seen anything like it. And I was born and raised here. Third generation.”
While Roswell has flooded before—the previous record for rainfall had been set in 1901—the NOAA classifies the October 2024 flood as a 500-year flood event. “Climate change is real,” acknowledges Cole, “and those things are changing across the globe, but nevertheless, in frequency, this is a 500-year event.”
Two people died in the flood, and Cole describes the harrowing rescues, numbering around 350. Luckily, he says, the National Guard had just completed their swift water rescue training following the recent Ruidoso fire, and just happened to be in Roswell that night. “It was a real battle all night long,” he says.
I visited Roswell in November and drove straight to the Roswell Museum, where I met with Brooks and Aaron Wilder, the curator. The museum interior was completely unrecognizable: empty, dark, floors and walls torn out exposing the skeletal armature of the building and, in some places, the original adobe walls. Generators were running dehumidifiers, crews were busy still removing boxes from the archive that had escaped the flood. Everyone was wearing head lamps.
“Some days it’s just like, this is so surreal. We’re living in an alternative universe right now, this shouldn’t have happened,” Brooks reflects. “I mean, there’s no control. You want to prevent disasters, but it happens.”
Brooks and Wilder described the immediate aftermath of the flood, as they literally pulled objects out of the mud, and the ongoing process of assessing potential damage to artworks. Some were submerged, some appeared unscathed, but the destructive power of the water quickly became evident.
A massive Luis Jiménez sculpture had traveled about ten feet across the floor.
A massive Luis Jiménez sculpture had traveled about ten feet across the floor; a metal sculpture appears to have floated around the gallery, judging by the water line on its pedestal; and a 1,200-pound glass display case had overturned and “became an aquarium,” Brooks describes.
With so many works needing attention all at once, the triage process has been overwhelming. “Nothing’s linear. Everything must happen at the same time,” Wilder says. A remediation company began work immediately and conservators arrived the day after the incident. FEMA arrived that Wednesday.
Across the city, while many private residences and businesses were flooded, and city properties like the Spring River Zoo and the Convention Center suffered significant damage, impacts were uneven. Other Roswell art spaces did not experience as severe damage as the Roswell Museum. The Anderson Museum’s parking lot flooded, but the water stopped short of the doors; the Roswell Artists-in-Residence Program compounds were unharmed; Bone Springs Art Space suffered flooding in the basement but no structural damage.
So when it came to the Roswell Museum, it was all hands on deck: city and museum staff, current and former, volunteers from museums from across the state, RAIR artists, and other community members all came to help clear out the museum. Some donations have poured in, and the museum received visits from Debra Garcia y Griego and Michelle Gallagher Roberts from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, representative Teresa Leger Fernández, and Senator Ben Lujan.
“We were still, over the course of two weeks, actively rescuing pieces,” Brooks says, “just moving as quickly as we could.”
Thousands of artworks were loaded onto refrigerated trucks (to inhibit mold growth) to travel to Chicago for assessment and conservation at The Conservation Center. TCC offered this statement:
The Conservation Center is honored to be assisting the Roswell Museum with rescue efforts for their collection that was affected by the flood in October. The items currently at our facility include paintings, works on paper, pottery, wooden objects, leather items, jewelry, and more. Each item will be carefully evaluated to develop a treatment plan catered to its specific needs. We are approaching this project carefully and methodically to make sure we deliver the best possible results for the museum and the community of Roswell. Alongside our work with private clients, we frequently collaborate with museums and institutions that have experienced a loss.
Instances like this can be truly devastating to an institution with such an important collection; we are committed to assisting and preserving Roswell Museum’s collection for future generations to come.
The swift response, rescue effort, and coordination between facility remediation contractors, conservators, volunteers, and more, is a feat. “So altogether, we’re 51,000 square feet, and to have to empty the entire building in less than a month was an amazing, overwhelming undertaking,” says Brooks.
Now the million-dollar question is: what will happen to the museum? Will it stay where it is, or will it need to be rebuilt somewhere else?
No one has the answer just yet. Cole informs me the city’s priority to implement FEMA’s Individual Assistance to community residents has gone “extremely well,” with $14.7 million already distributed to impacted area residents. On December 12, the city began the official process of identifying the scope of damages for FEMA’s Public Assistance, and is expected to conclude by February 10. Cole states that it’s anticipated that FEMA will reimburse the city up to 75% of the cost to repair and replace PA projects, but many of those projects will require formalized bids, coordination between various agencies, and approval at committee and ultimately by the City Council, in order to move forward with the services from architects, engineers, and contractors. In other words, “it’s going to take some time.”
To make matters more complicated, the museum had just been undergoing significant renovations, with new hardwood and terrazzo floors installed quite recently. The terrazzo survived the flood, but, unfortunately, the hardwood had to be ripped out.
An unexpected outcome of the flooding was how it revealed parts of the building’s history—which includes its original 1937 WPA Federal Arts Center building, expansions in the 1950s and 1960s, 1980s gallery additions, and the 1990s addition of the Art Education Center. Adobe walls, windows, doorways, and even a defunct bathroom were hidden behind drywall that has now been removed. “I always called it a ‘Frankenstein building,’” says Wilder. Now that these elements have been exposed, there’s potential for building it back in a way that would highlight that history while increasing its structural resilience.
The Roswell art community is taking steps to fill the gap left behind.
For now, work continues at a nearby off-site location in downtown Roswell on inventory and assessment efforts for each collection item that did not go to Chicago. It’s a laborious process taking place in a very provisional space, with only basic folding tables and chairs available. Only five museum computers survived the flood, so along with three additional computers that were purchased and donated, staff members are relying on their personal laptops.
“Imagining a return of the museum and healing for our community at the end of this difficult journey is what keeps us moving forward,” Brooks wrote in a message to museum members just before Thanksgiving.
With so many questions still in the air, one thing is for sure—the recovery process will take a lot of effort and a lot of time. It will be at least a few years before the Roswell Museum is able to open its doors.
In the meantime, the Roswell art community is taking steps to fill the gap left behind. AMoCA will be hosting the RAIR artist exhibitions that would have taken place at the Roswell Museum, and other art spaces are working toward hosting artists and workshops that may been displaced.
It’s quite a gap to fill, however, for a city the size of Roswell. The loss of the museum’s many spaces and offerings—from its landmark collection of art and historical objects, the planetarium, the classes at the Art Education Center, the photography darkroom, the ceramics studio—leaves a significant hole in the cultural landscape, and in the heart of the community.
