For the first time in four decades, America's fifth-longest river went dry in Albuquerque.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — On a recent, scorching afternoon in Albuquerque, off-road vehicles cruised up and down a stretch of dry riverbed where normally the Rio Grande River flows. The drivers weren't thrill-seekers, but biologists hoping to save as many endangered fish as they could before the sun turned shrinking pools of water into dust.. Habitat for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow — a shimmery, pinky-sized native fish — went with it.
“They're adapted for a lot of conditions but not to figure this out,” said Thomas Archdeacon, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in charge of a program to rescue the fish. “When you have flow one day and no flow the next for miles, they don’t know how to get out of that.” Historically, one way to send more water into the river has been to release it from upstream reservoirs. But this year, New Mexico has been unable to store extra water because of a downstream debt it owes Texas as part of a compact. Deep into the driest period the West has seen in“The timing and the placement of the storms weren't in the right place to keep the river flowing,” said Dave Dubois, New Mexico's state climatologist.
For the past four years, Ron Moya has farmed about 50 acres of hay and produce near Albuquerque. A retired engineer, Moya said he answered a calling to work the same land that generations of his family had cultivated before him. Last year, Moya left 10 acres of his plot unplanted in exchange for several thousand dollars, but said he wouldn’t do it this year — even though he was offered more money — because he wanted the moisture to keep the soil on his farm alive.
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