Artisode; Managing the Monsoon

I want to pursue the consciousness, what is the next thing I'm going to have to feel for myself and put out there in the world as prayer because my pieces are prayer. I think art is prayer. ichenichenichenichenichenichenichenichenichenichenichenichenichenichenichenichenichen yeah okay, don't kill yourself it's not maybe so important when you're talking about streets and inlets and pipes

but when those pipes start joining other pipes which join other pipes and now you're in a very large pipe or a channel now you need to know more about how much water is going to be flowing in that channel because that channel has got a mass I mean that water is heavy and it's got a velocity, it's got a momentum and if it gets unruly and escapes from that channel havoc will ensue engineered systems are always designed to handle kind of averages you can't design a pump station or a pipe or an arroyo to handle the very largest amount that you're going to get ever because it would be too large the analogy I like to use is freeways you design a freeway to handle the average amount of traffic and that means that there will be congestion every once in a while on the freeway obviously the thing that most people are going to think of when they think of storm water is the arroyos and some of which we've paved and then we call them channels

those were the natural gathering places for water as it came off the crest before humans came here we in Albuquerque are in an arid high elevation climate and while we don't get very much rain every year we do get it and usually in three months we generally consider July 1 through September 1 to be our monsoon season here's Albuquerque and here's the downtown area and here's the Sunport, here's the Sandia Crest right here, the Teheras Arroyo which is the Teheras Canyon and so our rain falls down and we're in this big valley that where the water comes all the way down to the Rio Grande and from here there's an escarpment and it comes back down this way we need to get the water back to the river and sometimes the best way to do that is to gather it up in a series of inlets and pipes

if you saw a map of the city you'd see a grid that would look like the street grid of underground pipes that carry this water hopefully safely away the city is below the level of the levy and so the water cannot naturally drain from the city to the river as it has over time because man built the flood control levy which is blocked off the storm drainage from reaching the river well the city operates 14 flood pumping stations, stormwater pumping stations the primary reason for their existence is to try and dry up or keep as dry as we can these low flat areas of the city near the downtown area this is just a standard electric motor that stays up here but it's connected to a shaft that goes all the way down to the bottom there and that's the working area of the pump that's called the volute, VOL UTE

and there's an impeller inside of the volute and the impeller and the volute are what actually work together to move the water sometimes I come in here and I think of this as kind of Frankenstein's workshop it seems like Dr. Frankenstein's area where he could flip a lever and the monster would come alive this is the last transformer of its voltage in the city that can drag down the voltage in an entire area, a PNM service area if the pumps all go on at the same time I would venture a guess that 98% of the people who drive on bridge do not know that just north of the bridge crossing at Rio Grande is one of our major outfalls of storm water to the Rio Grande these bars are here primarily for only one reason

and that's to keep people from climbing in here because this area that we're standing is very dangerous I wouldn't recommend anyone standing here if there's any hint of rain in the sky because the pumps could go on and any one of these four would end up being filled with water and it would knock you off this platform and into the lagoon the city has started to put money aside to begin a rehabilitation program for its pump stations I have put in $1.5 million in 2009 for whatever is necessary to keep the pumps in good working order and you can see that I've got $2 million per geo-bond cycle or a million dollars a year off into the decade you know when you have a 300-year-old city you run the system that I think Rumsfeld said this you run the system you have not the one you want it's the only quote I'll ever hear you'll ever hear me say from myself