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…