Residents glued to the windows of a riverside brewery in Ruidoso, New Mexico, when a flash flood swept the town with rocks and debris.
The nervous chat kept stuffing the tea room of the mountain brewing company with wool stoves, where about 50 people avoided the monsoon rainfall, causing Rio Ruidoso to expand to more than six meters on Tuesday, a temporary record.
As the whole house floated, the gasping sounds in the room grew louder and knocked down the trees on the trees.
The turquoise paint on the single-layer White House front door is barely visible under the dirt layer.
But local artist Kaitlyn Carpenter is filming the flood on his phone, which he immediately sees as the family home of one of her best friends.
“I’ve been to that house and I have memories in that house, so it’s heartbreaking to see it come from the river,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
Symbol of flood damage
No one was in the house that day. Carpenter said her friends stayed elsewhere in the summer because the mountains were prone to flooding.
Images and videos of the house she photographed were widely shared as a distinct symbol of flood damage.
Three people at Riverside RV Park died after being swept into the river, including two children. Dozens of houses have been damaged and the streets are blocked by mud and debris.
As the river grows further and further away, metal and other debris are wrapped around the trunks.
The broken tree limbs were wedged on the house and piled on the porch. The water is thick with sediment and many roads remain closed on Wednesday.
Popular summer destinations have been particularly vulnerable to flooding since last summer, when the South Fork and salt fires ran through the fire-dry forests and destroyed hundreds of homes. Residents were forced to escape from the wall of flames and only caught a severe flood later that summer.
