Ross Robertson poses in front of his childhood home in Roswell which was hit hard by the Oct. 20th storm that dumped at least six inches of rain in a few hours across Chaves County. Robertson, 70, has worked as a poll worker for the last decade, but cleaning up from the disaster will make him miss working an Election Day since 2014. (Danielle Prokop / Source NM)
ROSWELL – Next Tuesday will be the first Election Day in a decade that Ross Robertson will miss as a poll worker in his hometown.
Elections are clearly important to him, but right now, other problems are pulling him away.
He is one of the estimated thousands of people whose home was devastated by a record-breaking downpour in Roswell, which sent the Rio Hondo and Spring River surging from their banks and across the city. The nearly 6 inches of rain dumped by an Oct. 19 storm is blamed for two deaths and even forced an Election Day polling site to move. The damages are still being calculated, but Roswell Mayor Tim Jennings told Source NM more than 1,000 houses have been identified as having flood damage.
“It’s stressful on a good day to be a presiding judge,” said Robertson, surrounded by household memorabilia splattered with mud spread across the concrete behind his home. “But with all this stuff going on –” he gestures, then continues, “I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’”
Climate disasters are just one of the threats to U.S. elections workers, as concerns of violence fueled by disinformation, and an aging workforce all disrupt the efforts to keep employees in jobs vital to democracy.
‘Why don’t you just bulldoze it to the ground?’
Robertson, 70, is a retired banker who had lived and worked in Texas after leaving home for college. He moved back into the Roswell house he grew up in.
His retirement opened up time for another love of his, politics. He called himself an “amateur” having taken political science classes as his major in undergrad, before switching to history. In 2014, he started working as a Chaves County poll worker. He hasn’t missed an election since.
“I might work, maybe Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday of this week,” he said about early voting. “But I ain’t gonna work Election Day, it’s just too much for this guy.”
Robertson’s childhood home is a two-story pale yellow brick set next to the Spring River – which is little more than an arroyo most of the time.
It was the home his parents built in 1938, designed by his mother. She was meticulous about the details, Robertson recalled, such as pheasant-hunting scenes stenciled into the entry walls, a nod to Robertson’s fathers love of the outdoors.
Everything on the first floor – from the white and ivory art deco wallpaper to the antique wooden furniture to Robertson’s record collection – has a line of mud just over shin height.
In the garage behind the house, water flowed more than hip-height. The water swept up books and furniture stored there and broke through the windows to flow downstream – belongings lost for good.
Over the whir of fans pointing at the layer of dried silt caked to the hardwood floors, Robertson recalled advice from a flood claims insurer friend, who had just finished work in Florida and North Carolina from Hurricanes Helene and Milton, warning of the threats of mold taking hold in a short amount of time.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you just bulldoze it to the ground right now?’ That was his response,”Ross recalled.
It wasn’t just his home. The night of the flooding, after the floor was already covered shin-high he looked down from the second window and saw the headlights turned on with more than four feet of water rushing around the car. The car will have to be totalled, he estimated, but at least it has full insurance.
The same can’t be said for his home. Robertson doesn’t have flood or homeowner’s insurance, which is a growing problem nationwide as storms and flooding get worse and less predictable over time.
“Just homeowners was so expensive, and the idea of flood, it just never dawned on me,” he said. “I don’t even think my parents even had to have flood insurance when they built it”
‘Never seen nothing like this’
Paul Holstun, 71, Robertson’s friend since high school and a lifelong Roswellan, helped Robertson load up a truck Monday to help clear away some of the debris stacked up in the front yard .
“You ask people, they’ll tell you we’ve never seen nothing like this,” he said about floods in recent memory.
The pair share memories of previous floods. When he was younger, Robertson said, his family stuffed towels into the cracks of the doors to keep the water out of the house.
It didn’t work this time.
“I used a pile of towels, they were all filled up and water just started to squirt out the sides. Water was already pouring in the back door, too.”
Robertson pulls out photos dated 1954. The Spring River is high, sparkling darkly in the photograph, the mulberries in the front yard are shorter, but the yellow house remains above it all.
Robertson said he’s aiming to stay in Roswell. When asked if 2024 will be the last election he’ll work, Robertson takes a moment to consider.
“No,” he says, drawing it out, then smiles. “I don’t think so.”
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