“They told us exactly where it was going to come and what it was going to do,” said Hall, the fire chief.
Two wildfires stripped 25,000 acres above Ruidoso. Floods have followed every monsoon since. Governments have spent over half a billion dollars there, nine times the village’s annual budget. An engineer warned that a 100-year storm would bring six times the July 2024 flood. The village went back to selling tourism.