New Mexico teen recalls panic as flash flood waters stranded 100

After a whole night huddled under a tarp on a Roswell rooftop, Ashley Almeida climbed down a ladder with one of her friends into what was left of her quinceañera.

Much of the ballroom bore the marks of flash floodwaters: mud clung to blue and gold decorations, chairs draped with once-white cloths lay overturned, now brown with thick grime. On one of the tables were some of the gifts from the night before, meant to be a celebration of her 15th birthday. She picked up a Bible, photo album and teddy bear.

She left behind the remnants of her elaborate dress – royal blue and trimmed in gold – which she had set aside in favor of a backless romper that was more comfortable for dancing.

“My dress was in the water, there was just a little tiny piece of fabric left visible,” she recounted to Source NM, following the devastating weekend flooding.

It was a night the Almeida family took a decade saving for, but now it will be a night filled with painful memories for them and hundreds of others in Roswell. The storm that sent torrents of floodwater into the Roswell Convention and Civic Center, the site of the party, also inundated much of the city Saturday night and early Sunday morning, leaving two people dead in surrounding Chaves County. Officials reported more than 300 water rescues.

Javier Almeida, 48, described what should have been a happy occasion for his daughter quickly devolving into a matter of “life or death,” as more than 100 friends and family gathered for the quinceañera evacuated the ballroom to the rooftops.

Everyone attending, from the eight-month old infant, to his elderly mother and people in their 80s emerged safe, which the father credited to a miracle from God.

“I’m praying for everyone who has lost their homes, for our family members who’ve lost the opportunity to work, or to leave safely,” he said in Spanish.

Partygoers started arriving around 5 p.m., in a light rain. Two hours later, heavy rains started to pour. The National Weather Service would later say the deluge dumped almost 6 inches of rain in a matter of hours – more than half the area’s annual rainfall, and breaking a 1901 record for the most rain in a single event.

Zachary Lujan, the general manager of the convention and civic center, was called for help as the storm intensified. Water was creeping into the lobby and the roof had started to leak in a back hallway.

“We thought, ‘We’ll just squeegee the water out the doors, it can’t be that bad,’” Lujan said. “Before we knew it, it went from being just a little water coming in – to a couple feet at our front door and everything just skyrocketed from there.”

Lujan and five other maintenance workers tried using sandbags to block the water, to no avail.

“The next we knew, the sandbags weren’t doing anything, and we had to get people to the roof as fast as we could,” he said.

Almeida recalled that most people were in the ballroom, sitting down to eat at tables with sequined blue runners. Just before 10:30, she removed her dress to dance, but staff warned the floodwaters were rising, and that people would have to evacuate.

“We were trying to do the dance, but then that’s when they all came out and yelled out that it was canceled,” she said. “People were scrambling everywhere.”

She said cars were already flooded out, and that much of the family was stranded in the civic center. Around 11 p.m., the water was pouring in faster, and while Lujan started opening roof access, people stood on chairs to avoid the rising waters.

Lujan, a former volunteer firefighter, started sending people, including children and babies in carseats, up to the three rooftops that make up the civic center complex.

Members of the Almeida family, Lujan and some of the maintenance workers stripped tablecloths from banquet tables and retrieved tarps and trashbags for people to use as shelter from the rain, and they grabbed chips and water to help people make it through the storm on the rooftops.

It was cold and wet with the rains. Ashley was separated from her mom, Elva, who ended up on a separate rooftop.“We don’t see my mom, we don’t see my uncles and my aunts. Somebody was yelling out, ‘Where’s my kid?’ And it was like, it was a very stressful moment,” Ashley Almeida said.

Amid the stress, she also described seeing consideration – friends and family sharing clothes, trying to protect the youngest and oldest from the rain and cold.

Roswell Fire Department arrived Sunday about 7 a.m. to help the elderly and children down from the rooftops.

Ashley Almeida, a sophomore at Roswell High School, said she wants to repay her parents and help her stranded family and is in the process of setting up a GoFundMe.

“I just feel terrible because my parents did spend a lot of money to try to give me a really good day,” she said. “I just felt so bad for everybody that showed up there. Their babies were hungry, and they were crying, they were cold, and everyone was just really stressed out.”

New Mexico and federal officials continued to survey damage Tuesday. Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham declared a state of emergency Monday, which opens up $1 million in state money for local officials to access for costs during the assessments.