(C) El Paso Matters.org
This story was originally published by El Paso Matters.org and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Podcast: More on flash flooding in El Paso, how water utility tries to manage stormwater [1]

['Diego Mendoza-Moyers', 'More Diego Mendoza-Moyers', 'El Paso Matters', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width']

Date: 2025-07-18

Diego Mendoza-Moyers: Today, we’re talking flooding, stormwater and civil engineering in El Paso.

Over the last month, we’ve seen a handful of rain storms that have led to localized flooding, especially in one hard-hit neighborhood in the Northeast. But every El Paso Water customer pays a stormwater fee of $7.42 per month on their water bills to fund projects that prevent or limit flooding in the city. So, why do we still see flash flooding in El Paso?

I’m Diego Mendoza-Moyers, a reporter with El Paso Matters. And I’m joined by assistant editor Pablo Villa to talk about the flooding we’ve seen in El Paso, why we see water pool in streets even after brief rain storms, and what El Pasoans are getting for that $7 monthly stormwater fee they pay on their water bills.

But before we start: this El Paso Matters Podcast episode is sponsored by Tawney, Acosta and Chaparro: truck crash and injury attorneys. Their team of local, seasoned trial attorneys are ready to help if you’ve been injured in a crash.

Pablo, thanks for joining me.

Pablo Villa: Appreciate the opportunity. So, let’s start with the obvious question many El Pasoans are asking, and that’s: Why does the city, or parts of the city, flood so easily? In your story, you note that, even with less rainfall than usual this year, some neighborhoods like Palomino in the Northeast and areas near Franklin High School were hit pretty hard. Can you walk us through the factors that make El Paso especially prone to flash flooding?

Diego: Yeah. And I think the number one thing that, when you talk to meteorologists or geologists, the answer really has to do with our soil here in El Paso. We’ve got a lot of impervious rock and a lot of kind of loose gravelly soil. And, so, like you said, we get about 9 inches of rainfall per year, and this year we’re actually quite a bit below that. We’re less than 2 inches of rainfall midway through July, where usually we would see over 3 inches of rain by now. So, it’s still a pretty dry year by historic standards, but, still, whenever we get kind of concentrated rain it falls on this impervious rock and then kind of runs off. And we have all these canyons and arroyos and slopes and it’s always seeking to go to the lowest ground. So, that’s why we see, sometimes, really localized issues with flooding in neighborhoods.

In a city like Houston that gets 50 inches of rainfall per year – five times what we get here – the composition of the soil is such that it allows for the water to absorb and there’s kind of underground drainage and it just doesn’t pool up as quickly as it does here in cities like Houston and elsewhere that see a lot more rainfall, but don’t have quite the same flash flooding issues directly from rainfall that we see.

And, so, that’s really a big part of it, is that just kind of the natural makeup of our geology and the soil and the steep slopes that we deal with.

And then the other thing is kind of a cost issue, right? Like, El Paso Water, in theory, could have this extremely robust system – and we do have a big system for storm water – but it could be even bigger, right, with even bigger drainage basins and ponds and ditches and so forth. But there’s kind of this balance where, how much are we willing to pay to build out infrastructure to to redirect storm water and floods when we only get 9 inches of rain per year, right?

And that’s not to say that there’s some serious issues and, in the Palomino neighborhood, we saw homes actually get inundated with a couple of inches of rainfall, which is kind of the worst case scenario in El Paso. I mean, that’s pretty destructive for homes and pretty disruptive. And there are other – we see water pool up in streets and maybe muddy streets or damage to rock walls. We see things like that, but really, the most intense thing is when the water pools up and inundates homes.

A mud-covered car parked on a street in the Campo del Sol subdivision in Northeast El Paso, where a flash flood occurred in late June 2025. (Courtesy Cynthia Boyar Trejo Facebook)

But, like I said, it’s all a cost issue, where we pay the $7.42 fee and, so, from El Paso Water’s perspective, it’s like that’s enough money to build really big projects and to do a lot of things, but maybe not necessarily enough to sort of solve the issue of flooding. And when we see strong rainfall, maybe a couple of inches in an hour or two, it’s just that, do we want to spend the money to limit that sort of thing when it only happens maybe every few years, right? Especially, like I said, 9 inches of rainfall – it’s not like it’s raining here all the time.

Pablo: So, you mentioned that there’s been large amounts of infrastructure that have been set up throughout El Paso, and much of that has come over the last, the better part of the last two decades, right? I think we both were around during the historic rains of 2006, which is kind of what spurred all of this into action, right? And I think for the (most) part, we do see some of the impacts of that – or maybe we don’t, right? And what I’m referring to is when you drive along Interstate 10 during a hard rain, you no longer see those sections close to Piedras and some of those areas that used to become just flooded completely. You don’t see that anymore, right? And, so, that’s a direct impact from some of this stormwater stuff that we do see and that does positively impact how our city, our residents can deal with hard rains. And a lot of that is because of this stormwater fee, which you outline in your story.

And, so, with that, El Pasoans are paying more on their water bills each month, right? So, what are they getting for that? You mentioned that the stormwater fee has increased to $7.42 a month, that’s up from a little less than $5 a few years ago. And, despite that, some residents still – the water is pooling in their streets, right? And what does El Paso Water say to customers who feel they’re not seeing a return on that investment?

Diego: Yeah. And you mentioned the projects, these two massive ponds, I think the project name is called Gateway Ponds, but they’re kind of in Central El Paso, right around where I-10 and Piedras intersect. And you’ll see on the north and south side of the freeway these massive ponds, really deep, really huge. And, so, I think they have a capacity of, like, 50 million gallons of water to hold when it rains on the eastern slope of the mountain and it washes down into this neighborhood in Central and then the lowest point there is I-10. And, so, we’ve seen in decades past the water pool up on I-10, and obviously that’s really disruptive not just for a local neighborhood, but really everyone who’s traveling, right?

So, you have these two ponds now that capture the stormwater and keep it from going on the road. And, so, that’s one example of many, many dozens of projects throughout the city, some much bigger than others. That’s what the stormwater fee is going to. And I think El Paso Water has spent, since the stormwater utility was set up in 2008 following the really bad flooding we saw in 2006, since ‘08 I think the stormwater utility has spent around $350 million on projects. So, that’s about half of the total project list that the utility identified when, after 2006, it’s like, “Hey, let’s really improve our stormwater and infrastructure and El Paso to prevent flooding.” So, they identified $650 million worth of projects that had to get done. So they’re over halfway through. And, so, that’s what we’ve gotten, right?

And it’s hard, though, for example, if you live in Central, in Manhattan Heights let’s say, and some of these older neighborhoods that still see flooding issues, because that’s kind of how they were designed, is for the water to run through the streets. And there wasn’t the sort of drainage ditches and stuff. But so, say, after a rain storm, you see huge boulders piling up in your street, right, because of the water washing them down there, like, it’s great that there are these ponds and these other projects have been built, but it’s still frustrating.

So, you hear that frustration. And $7.42 times 12 is, like, $89 a year, so, $89 bucks a year is not – that’s something people notice, right? But I think, when you zoom out, that’s when you can kind of see where all this money is going. There’s the Pico Norte Pond, which is across the street from Eastwood Middle School. And, so, that gathers up a lot of water and prevents flooding in that area. And, so, every part of town has these projects that exist. And, again, some are more noticeable than others, right? A lot of them, it’s, a culvert or kind of a tunnel underneath the street that redirects water from the street, are things that we may see but you don’t really notice this big picture of this civil engineering infrastructure that really does limit flooding in town. But, of course, it’s a challenge when it still happens. Right? And this neighborhood we’re talking about, Palomino, what do they care how much El Paso water spent if water is still inundating their homes?

So, it’s a tough issue for El Paso Water to communicate. But, I think the way that they look at it is, “Hey, we only bring in so much money from this fee. What can we prioritize and we can’t sort of solve for everything.” But, of course, that’s not a really satisfying answer for everyone. But I think the idea is to try to, to the extent possible, limit the flooding and try to – maybe you’ll have some pockets of floods, but you just try to limit it as much as you can.

Pablo: Yeah. And, certainly, I’m not trying to necessarily apologize for El Paso Water and the work that they do. I mean, I think – I point out Interstate 10 and the projects there because you can imagine what it would do to the city and to commerce and things if that continued to be a problem year-in-year-out, right? So, cleaning that up, I think, was a high priority for, for, for El Paso Water. And, I think, justifiably so. I think it does make this city run a little bit better.

That being said, there are projects that they haven’t gotten to them yet, or they’re in progress, right? And, so, there are pockets of El Paso that see those issues still all these years later.

But, I know that you mentioned in your story that El Paso Water uses a benefit-to-cost model, right, to sort of create a priority list for their projects. And one of the major themes in the interview that you had with an El Paso Water executive was how they decide where to focus the resources that they have. Because they don’t have infinite resources, right? They have to sort of work within the realm that they have, right? So, how does this framework, this cost-benefit framework, influence which areas of town get major projects like dams or ponds and which just get a visit from something like a pump truck?

Diego: Yeah. And so this is this big evaluation they do, right? And it gets very technical, right, with all their engineering, math and science and stuff to sort of look at, if there’s a certain degree of flooding in an area, what’s the impact, how many homes are affected, businesses and so forth?

And, so, that’s kind of how you pick and choose, like, what do we fund and what don’t we fund? And, so, a really high priority project that they would point out would be this Will Ruth Pond in the Northeast that’s off of Dyer (Street), and, I mean, it’s really a massive pond. We’ll talk a little more about it, but the idea there is like “Hey, this will, if not totally solve flooding in Northeast, really, really limit the flooding issues. Because water wants to go to the lowest point. And, so, you kind of find the lowest point in that area and they’re just excavating this massive, massive piece of property. It’s like a $35 million project. And, so, something like that proceeds because it’s like, “Hey, we see that this is going to affect a pretty big chunk of the city and it’s not just one little pocket here or there.”

El Paso Water recently began work on the Will Ruth Pond in Northeast El Paso. It’s designed to limit flooding by storing up to 100 million gallons of stormwater. (Diego Mendoza-Moyers / El Paso Matters)

It’s something that will have a really pretty big effect. And, so, that’s how they prioritize projects. Meanwhile, some of the other ones and, to go back to Manhattan Heights, there are certain projects that may only affect a few homes, but would be really, really costly to build a whole new drainage, ditch or or series of infrastructure projects to prevent, say, water from pooling up in a street, right? And the other thing, too, is you look at the cost, but what’s the benefit? Is the benefit that you’re preventing water from entering homes and from flooding a home and causing a lot of damage? Or is the benefit that you prevent water from pooling in the streets for any period of time? And I think El Paso Water just looks at the benefit really closely, right? Like, is this a minor inconvenience we’re solving for, or is this a really, really damaging situation and flooding that’s causing a lot of havoc and and really affecting homeowners, right?

Versus, “Hey, I can’t walk through my street for half an hour after a rain storm because water is flooding through, right?” That probably wouldn’t score really high in terms of the benefit. So, that’s how they look at it. And then also, the quote Gilbert Trejo told me, I mentioned the Will Ruth Pond is like $35 million bucks. I mean, a lot of these projects are millions and millions of dollars, sometimes tens of millions. And, so, do you spend that level of funding, right, to solve for maybe a not a really, really serious, hazardous issue? Or, do you say “Hey, look. We get it. You’re having water pool in your streets. We’ll get some pump trucks out there, we’ll get, I think, their vector control, or whatever they call it, to prevent mosquitoes from pooling up. Like, kind of band-aids, right? Fixes to just try to solve the issue after a day or two.

And that’s what they tell customers, I think, when they’re not going to build a huge project. They say, “OK, look, we hear your complaints. We’ll try to solve that without spending all this money. Because, you can imagine, like, again on Manhattan Heights, right, if they were to build a whole new series of infrastructure to solve for a couple of times a year maybe water running into the streets, people on maybe the far Westside or Far Eastside are going to go, “Hey, why are you spending tens of millions of dollars to do that, and then charging the rest of the customers,” right? They only make the $7.42 per customer. And, so, you’ve got to make that stretch. And where do you direct the projects? And that’s where the benefit-to-cost comes in, because you want it to have as widespread an impact as possible, so customers don’t look at it and go “Man, you’re spending all of our dollars that are limited on these projects that don’t have a big benefit.”

Gilbert Trejo, El Paso Water’s vice-president for engineering, operations and technical services, says that the utility’s main goals for stormwater projects are to collect water, especially runoff from the Franklin Mountains, and convey it safely through the surrounding communities, at Arroyo 1A on July 17, 2025. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Water)

Pablo: OK. So, that’s a really good analysis, good take on how they assess that. Because they didn’t necessarily start this utility with unlimited funds, right? They’ve got to build up their savings just like anyone else would to fund a project, right? So, that’s what they’re dealing with and that’s why we see some of the things we see, right?

And so, you know, going back further into history, I mean, I think El Paso has this very extensive pre-Cambrian history when it comes to its geology and geography and what makes up some of the unique things that we see. That’s why we all walk out of our house and see a mountain every day, right? So, the city’s geography plays a role in complicating flood control, right? And one thing that stood out in your piece is how unique El Paso’s terrain is, right? We have mountains, we have valleys, we have flatlands and hard soils, soft soils all over the city. What did Gilbert Trejo say about how that shapes flood control planning compared to other cities?

Diego: Yeah, and you don’t want to sort of excuse El Paso Water too much whenever there are flooding issues. But, I think when you really look, there is a very complicated terrain in El Paso. We have this mountain range, right in the middle of the city. And in some ways, like, it presents a lot of challenges for development. And we also have these river valleys, the Upper Valley, Lower Valley, and they have their own kind of differences, I guess. So there’s just these various challenges of how do you direct drainage? And what are the issues? And I think – Gilbert was talking about how, on the east side of the mountains, the slopes are a little bit not quite as steep, and, so, that presents a different challenge versus the west side where they’re much steeper.

And, so, you have to kind of manage faster-flowing water. Then you have on the east side, kind of a flatland area, right? Kind of a desert plain is what he called it. So, you have to build more ponds all throughout to sort of capture the rain. And, then, kind of the ultimate point that Gilbert made is that we have to deal with probably some flooding to be able to have these developments, right? I mean, like I said earlier, we could have huge swaths of the city be drainage basins or be ponds. But hey, we want to have homes there instead, right? We want to have a city.

And, so that’s part of it. And part of what they do is they build these dams all around the mountains to prevent the water from rushing down the mountain into neighborhoods. If you ever go walk up Mckelligon Canyon, right, and you’re walking up the walking trail towards the amphitheater, there’s a pretty large dam on the right hand side there that blocks the water from – it accumulates in the mountain, rushes down into the neighborhood, but those dams block it.

And one interesting thing, to bring up Manhattan Heights again, to this point of “Why do we see in Manhattan Heights, pretty frequently, water rushing through the streets?” Well, the reason is because when that was constructed 100 years ago, right, or more, for the developer, it’s like well, we want to build a home. Do you want to have to build a dam up on the mountain? The developer goes, “I don’t want to do that. I’ll just build somewhere else.”

So, the solution is, we’ll use the streets as conveyance, is what they call it, as sort of the – instead of having a drainage ditch, the street essentially is that to allow the water to rush down. So, the question is, do you allow for some of these inconveniences, or do you not have a neighborhood, right? And, again, not to cop out for El Paso Water too much, right, but I think that’s a fair question. Like, you have to deal with the environment you’re in, right? And if you’re going to build up near the mountain because it’s beautiful and it (has) great views and it’s kind of a unique environment, there might be some challenges. Especially for places that were built under different drainage design standards back 100-plus years ago, right?

And then I’ll just say this, too. On the Westside, El Paso Water just unveiled today this new Arroyo One dam that is this new almost $6 million project that they built in the foothills of the western side of the mountain. And it leads into this kind of Franklin Hills area not far from Hornedo Middle School. And, so, that’s this whole drainage ditch that they built up in the mountains. And they expanded it and did all this stuff to ensure that, if it rains really hard and water is rushing really fast down the mountain, this ditch can kind of capture that and take it into the drainage ditch. And I used to skateboard down drainage ditches, and I wasn’t really thinking about – we thought of it more of like a skate park. But, really, it’s part of this big picture of like, we’ve got to have all of this infrastructure to allow for the development to happen. Otherwise we just wouldn’t have neighborhoods in certain parts of town.

A stormwater control project recently completed by El Paso Water in Westside El Paso is designed to safely collect and convey water as it flows down from the mountains, July 17, 2025. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)

Pablo: Honestly, this is one of the things that I found the most fascinating with your story. Just to look at – I talked about geologic history, but El Paso itself, we’re going on 200 years, I think it’s 175 years. The city was founded in 1850, right? And you have to wonder what was going through the minds of city planners back then, late (19th century), all those things and the things they had to deal with. And it is just interesting how you can go into a Manhattan Heights neighborhood, the houses are pretty tightly compacted in. And you’re right, there are rolling streets all over the place, and the water does rush down those streets during times of rain. I live way out on the Eastside, and I know it’s a lot flatter, but there’s also a lot of pockets where there’s ponds and those kinds of things just tucked into neighborhoods. So, it is just interesting how city planning, municipal planning factors into all these things through generations, right. And who knows what it’s going to look like 25, 50 years from now here in El Paso. But, that was one of the things that I really like that you got into with Gilbert and to see how city planning decisions sort of factor into what happens today.

So, moving on, El Paso Water was tasked with condensing its 20-year flood plan into just 10 years, right? What’s the impact of that acceleration? You reported that City Council pushed the utility to double its pace after the floods that happened in the city in 2020. Has this faster timeline helped them? And is it financially sustainable given everything that you just outlined and given how much debt the utility has already taken on?

Diego: Yeah. So after some flooding that the city experienced in 2021 – I think there were parts of the city that saw four-plus inches of rainfall, right? And, again, you compare that to 9 inches over the course of a year, so that’s pretty intense flooding – all put into perspective, right?

But, so, after that, City Council said, “Hey, we need to go faster building projects. We need to get things done so next time we have a flash flood, it won’t be so damaging, right, or catastrophic.” And, so, that’s when we saw the Will Ruth Pond project that I mentioned that, for now, is the number one stormwater project El Paso Water is working on. And, so, it was really in 2021 – El Paso Water, since the stormwater utility was created in 2008, had this kind of list of projects that they’ve identified and done all the math and science and doing all the, you know planning and design for, right? And then, City Council said, “Hey, we’re going to allow you to raise the stormwater fee and bring in more money and really, like, you need to spend more money and do this and get these projects built.”

And, so, that’s when we first saw – I believe the stormwater fee when it was first introduced back in 2008 on water bills, it was like just under $4.00 and then that ticked up very slowly. So that was ’08. In 2022, it was right around $5. So, it had risen maybe a dollar or so over 14-15 years since 2022, we’ve seen the fee go from about $5 bucks to $7.42, right. So it’s increased, and El Paso, Water has been spending, like, $70 million a year on projects, which is a pretty pretty sizable amount. But I think the financial challenges are presenting themselves, because El Paso Water says, “Look, this $7.42 we collect from our customers, it only brings in enough money to cover operations and maintenance. Meaning, basically, the salaries of the employees that are working in stormwater. And then kind of maintaining the current drainage ditches and ponds and making sure they’re not getting clogged up, right, or whatever. Like, just kind of keeping the system going.

And then capital projects and new construction projects, El Paso Water has to issue debt every year to fund those. So, a Will Ruth Pond or any project that requires a new construction project, new capital spending, they have to issue debt for. And, so, they’ve been doing that annually since ‘08, right? Every year “Hey, to do this project, this pond, this drainage (ditch), we’ve got to issue a few million in debt, right, or several million.” But that’s kind of piled up, right? And, so, now where they’re at is that, you can imagine, as your debt pile gets bigger your interest gets bigger, but the money that they’re bringing in hasn’t increased that much, right? It has in the last couple of years. But I think the thing is, this debt pile has gotten large, and so it’s harder for them to keep issuing debt and be able to pay that.

The good news is they issue debt in 20-year timelines. And, so, the first debt that they issued was back in ’08. And, so, that will mature and basically they’ll pay it off here in about 3 years. And, so, at that point, El Paso Water will kind of have more ability to issue debt and kind of take on new projects. But I think that it kind of points to they’re going to need to maybe slow down a little bit as far as their spending on these projects. And Gilbert told me “No, no, we’re not going to decelerate our pace,” right? And they do have a lot of things going now, the Will Ruth Pond will be going for another year-and-a-half or so, I believe.

So they’ll still be doing projects and stuff. But I do think that it’s this problem that we see across all utilities, whether it’s water or electricity or whatever, is, like, the cost of infrastructure is going up. And the only way to pay for it is usually through customers, right? And, so, how much can customers afford? Do you see further stormwater increases?

And part of it, too is, like, (water) bills generally are getting unaffordable in El Paso, right? I think we all know that. It’s not just the stormwater fee, it’s the water, the wastewater, the rates have increased for 9 or 10 years straight. And they’re going to continue escalating because El Paso Water has huge projects on the drinking water side and on the sewage side, right? They’re expanding a sewage treatment plant in the Lower Valley, and they’re building a new water treatment plant, and they’re expanding another, the desalination plant. Like, they’ve got a lot of stuff going on outside of stormwater, right? Outside of just these kind of drainage and rain issues.

So, they’re spending a ton of money. They need to bring in more money from customers. How much can the people of El Paso bear to pay, right? And I think that’s a real point of concern for the utility. But, just to kind of bring it back to the stormwater issue, that’s sort of where they’re at funding wise, right? Is that they had to accelerate this plan and do it quicker and faster and solve these flooding issues as soon as possible. But, you only have so much room for that when everything you paid for is paid for by customers. And how much more are we willing to pay beyond the $7.42? And I would expect, probably, to see more stormwater fee increases in the years ahead. How much? It’s hard to say. But everything seems to be pointing to that. The utility needs to bring more money to pay for these projects.

Pablo: As a taxpayer, that’s unfortunate news to hear, right? It is a pocketbook issue as much as it is a quality of life issue, and I know you’ll keep us informed on that in the months and years ahead. So, thank you for that.

You outlined really well how El Paso Water goes about financing these things and planning these things. But let’s talk a little bit about the projects themselves, right, and their impact. We alluded to Will Ruth Pond several times during our discussion here. That was listed in your story as a mega project, right? That along with things like Palisades Dam and some others. What makes those projects significant, right, and what kind of impact will they have once they’re complete or now that some of them are complete?

Diego: Yeah. And again, I mean, and I keep talking about the Will Ruth Pond, but I think, really, El Paso Water – that’s, like, the first thing they’ll tell you about. “This is our biggest project, and it’s really going to alleviate a lot of the long-standing flooding issues that we see in Northeast.” We’ve seen them kind of rear their head, right, in the last few weeks in this particular neighborhood in Palomino. But it’s not a new thing out there that they deal with flooding. And businesses off Dyer sometimes will flood and things like that. So the thinking is, “Hey, let’s build this really, really massive pond that can hold, I think, it’s up to 100 million gallons of water, even a little bit over that. And if you go drive over there, I mean, it’s right across the street from the YMCA up there in the Northeast. And it’s, I mean, it’s a massive piece of property, right? If it’s not a mile long, it’s a half mile long. It’s really long and they’re excavating this massive piece of property, right?

And, so, I was out there the other day and what they’re doing right now is that they’re basically just digging it deeper and deeper. They’ve got a tractor going, scooping dirt up, pouring it into the back trailers of semi-trucks and then one semi after another comes and takes this dirt out and, I guess, they go to the landfill or or somewhere. But, just, the point is, I mean, it’s a huge scale project, right, where you one truckload of dirt is like a drop in the bucket for this massive property. So, it just kind of shows you the scale of what we’re talking about here. Like, they talk about these projects, but they really are pretty big for a utility of El Paso Water’s size, to excavate this massive property.

El Paso Water recently began work on the Will Ruth Pond in Northeast El Paso. It’s designed to limit flooding by storing up to 100 million gallons of stormwater. (Diego Mendoza-Moyers / El Paso Matters)

And beyond this actual design and engineering work, before any of this happens, you’ve got to acquire the land, right? And deal with homeowners and property owners and communicate to them “Hey, this street is going to be closed, that street is going to be closed.” So, it’s very disruptive, right, to do these projects. It costs a lot of money. It takes years of planning and design before you even put a shovel in the ground. And then you’ve got to get your contractor on board. And, so, that Will Ruth Pond in particular is a really big project, and it’s not easy to undertake those types of things.

Some of the other ones that they have going on is they’re also doing this Palisades Dam that, it’s kind of at the beginning of the Billy Rogers Arroyo, if you can imagine, off of Robinson Avenue not far from the entrance to Scenic Drive. And they’re – again, it’s near the mountain, right? And, so, they’re trying to expand the culvert and allow for more water to wash down the mountain in a rainstorm and kind of expand the ability of the system to hold the water. And, so, again, it’s not really flashy or sexy, right? But it’s kind of just like “Hey, if there’s a really big rainstorm, we want to be able to have the ability to to manage that and to prevent it from reaching homes” right?

And I’ll just mention another kind of low-key aspect of this, or not widely recognized aspect of all of this, is like, when they build these projects, the whole idea is that, “Hey, if we increase the capacity that we have to kind of hold water, we actually take homes out of the floodplain,” right? And, so, a lot of places in El Paso – I mean, technically, if you look at a FEMA floodplain map, there are a lot of places in El Paso where homeowners really should have flood insurance, right? And there’s a risk of flooding. And people, maybe they have to pay for that, or they just don’t have it and they face that risk.

And, so, a big goal of the stormwater utility is to take swaths of El Paso out of the floodplain and prevent or reduce their risk of flooding. And so, you’ll see per project, I think the Will Ruth Pond is, it’s several hundred parcels of property that are removed for the floodplain from that one. So, that’s a big part of it, is that “Hey, if we build this system to be able to hold more water and to direct this water, then if a 100-year flood hits, then X amount of homes will not get flooded.

And they also point to the Pico Norte Pond because really developed parts of town, like off of Montana on the Eastside, are in a floodplain. But you wouldn’t know that because there’s enough infrastructure there, where if it rains, it doesn’t flood. And if some of this stuff wasn’t there, a lot of homes would. And, so, that’s kind of another aspect of this, is this insurance aspect, and trying to, gradually, as much as possible, take homes in El Paso out of the floodplain and reduce their risk.

Pablo: Your interview with Gilbert Trejo ended on a pretty candid note. He said that Mother Nature is undefeated. Does that mean that we’ll never be able to prevent flooding entirely? Or is the goal for El Paso Water more about minimizing the worst case scenarios? And if you’d like to touch on this, I mean, what role, if any, does climate change play in any of this?

Diego: Yeah. So, like you said, I mean, Gilbert basically was like “Man, Mother Nature, at some point at some time, it’s going to drop more water than the infrastructure in place is designed to handle.” And, so, yeah, because I was curious, like, are we building to some point where, after you spend so many hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s like, “Man, we really solved flooding.”

But then you think there’s always going to be needs for renovations that the stormwater fee is going to fund, renovation or, we have growth, right? So there’s going to be new projects that need to be done. And, so, I think it’s safe to say it’s impossible to say “Hey under any circumstance, we’re not going to have any flooding,” right?

And you even see that in other cities obviously, right? It’s not just El Paso that deals with flooding. We saw San Antonio, the city of San Antonio, deal about a month ago, with some really, really extreme flooding. And I used to live in San Antonio, and it’s crazy to see certain parts underwater and vehicles getting washed away. And they’ve spent hundreds of millions on flood infrastructure there too, right? And I think there’s a, there’s a little bit of a debate of like, do we need to improve our infrastructure or is this just kind of a freak thing of nature? And it’s the same thing here.

You can’t ever say, like “Man, we’ve really solved flooding” in a town where, yeah, we’ve built right up to the mountain. We’ve got these low-lying areas in the lower and upper valleys that water wants to go there. So, I think it’s fair of Gilbert to say like, we’re never probably going to totally solve this. But what we can do is build projects that mitigate it, limit the risk that most El Paso’s face and try to just limit it as much as possible.

And then yeah, I mean, as far as climate change, the trend of rising temperatures is clear. The trend of precipitation is sort of less clear, right? Like, are we seeing more or less with the shifting climate? But I think one thing that is clearer with the precipitation is that you see more intense extremes, right? Like, when it rains, it rains more, or sometimes when it rains it, it’ll hang over an area for a long period of time, and that’s what we saw in Central Texas, right? With one of the great tragedies in the state of Texas, and Kerrville and so forth with these intense storms causing historic flooding.

And, so, that’s something that – the data does show, like, when it does rain, it’s probably going to rain harder and will we be able to outrun that? And it’s not totally clear. So, I think from that perspective, it’s hard to predict the future of how this is going to go. But that’s why El Paso Water, they’ve got a long list of projects, a lot of work left to do. And, so, hopefully we’re here 10, 20 years from now and it’s like, “Man, we’ve got a really robust infrastructure, maybe there’s some flooding issues somewhere, but we’ve generally mitigated the problem for most El Pasoans.”

Pablo: All right, Diego, good stuff. I think we’ll close the discussion there. I encourage all our listeners to go check out your story on flooding and stormwater projects at elpasomatters.org. And I know you’ll keep us informed on all the latest developments on this and other energy and environment topics. And thanks for having me on the show.

Diego: For sure. We’ll talk again soon, Pablo. Thanks.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://elpasomatters.org/2025/07/18/el-paso-water-flash-flooding-rain-weather-clima/

Published and (C) by El Paso Matters.org
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/elpasomatters/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.