Gallup floods Route 66 for third time this year, businesses scramble
Streets in Gallup flooded Monday for the third time this year, hitting businesses downtown along Route 66 and prompting the city to urge residents to stay away from the corridor during storms. More rain is expected later this week, and city crews are clearing gutters and drains in flood-prone areas ahead of it.
With two to three feet of water building up on busy city streets, residents and businesses in McKinley County are preparing. “We bought a flood control barrier for the front,” said Cha’ahh Leo Flores, the owner of Cha’ahh. “That helped mitigate some of the water, so it just went a quarter inside the building. We waterproofed the floor before the floods came.”
Other businesses along Route 66 have also taken on water. “With these storefronts here along Route 66, some of them had a few inches of water inside the building, and as cars drive by, the water would displace right into their front door,” said Gallup McKinley County Chamber of Commerce CEO Peter Campos.
Mayor Marc DePauli said the city had not seen flooding of this scale in years. “The last time we had big floods like this was in 2005, 2006,” DePauli said.
DePauli said the problem is that the drainage system is not built to move large amounts of water out of downtown and into the Puerco River. “Right now most of those channels are 100 years old; they were built with Route 66, and there hasn’t been a lot of maintenance done on those,” he said. “They’re full of vegetation. Vegetation has to be removed, and they have to be recontoured so water will flow out of downtown and into the Puerco River.”
Campos said the city has run into jurisdictional issues when trying to clear storm drainage. “The city does not own the property where the storm drainage goes through, and they’ve had difficulties working with the railroad and the state to be allowed to clear out the soil and silt that gets built up in there,” he said.
The City of Gallup is asking residents not to drive through roads where two feet or more of water is sitting, and to stay away from Route 66 during a storm.
