The Middle Rio Grande Valley Conservation District manages the river between Cochiti Pueblo and Elephant Butte. The ongoing drought has devastated water supplies in the Middle Valley. Water Operations Division Manager Anne Marken spoke with KUNM’s Mark Haslett about which parts of the river are currently dry.
Marken: This year has been one of the worst, if not the worst, year on record for Middle Valley water supply, and that's really just a result of the record low snowpack we saw in the mountains this winter, the above average temperatures we've been experiencing, and a lackluster monsoon season, combined with incredibly dry basin conditions.
So when we do receive monsoon rain events, less of that water is showing up in the river because the landscape is so dry. It's really just absorbing a lot more of it than we typically see, and that's resulted in record low inflows into the the Middle Valley. Today, the release from Cochiti Reservoir is about 150 cubic feet per second, which is the lowest we've seen since 1988.
They've been tracking river channel drying for 25 years, and the average river miles dry in a year is closer to 37. So we're more than double what we typically see for as far as river channel drying goes. There are about 13 river miles dry in the Albuquerque area, and the extent of that drying, it runs from around Paseo del Norte down to south of the Rio Bravo Bridge, so right through the heart of Albuquerque. And this is only the third year since the 1980s that the river through Albuquerque has dried. So it dried in 2022, 2025, and now this year.
Haslett: So between Albuquerque and Elephant Butte, what other stretches are dry right now?
Marken: Total, there's 82 river miles dry. Below San Acacia, which is in the Socorro division or Socorro reach of the river, there's about 48 river miles dry, and then in Valencia County, there's about 21 river miles dry.
Haslett: What happens when there just isn't enough water for the irrigators who have an allotment, but they aren't able to irrigate up to their allotment? How does that work when there literally isn't enough to go around?
Marken: Well, right now there's no non-tribal irrigation happening in the Albuquerque area. The amount of water that's entering the Middle Valley it's just enough to meet the needs of the priority water rights, the six Middle Rio Grande Pueblos. And so what that means is that people in the Albuquerque area have been waiting over 100 days to receive water, some of them longer than that. If you drive around, you'll see there's a lot of dry, crispy fields out there, and it's just been an incredibly challenging year, not just for river drying, but also for irrigators.
Haslett: So you say that, however, the six Pueblos in the Middle Valley — they are receiving what their allotment is?
Marken: Correct. When there's only enough water to meet the needs of their water right, everybody else is curtailed, and they're the only irrigators that receive water because they have a much older water right, and it's in priority to everybody else's, since they've been irrigating since what they say is time immemorial.
