At 4.10am on December 13, 1951, Henry Fulkes, working in the Southern Pacific railroad yard in Tucumcari heard a slight rumble. Mrs Claude Moncus, wife of the city’s sheriff, thought a jet plane was flying low over the apartment in the courthouse where she was staying. Early riser Lorenzo Gutierrez believed he saw a fireball from his front window. And then all hell broke loose.

One and a quarter million gallons of water suddenly cascaded down on Tucumcari’s business district, destroying life and property alike. Water was waist deep for three blocks and one of the city’s three municipal water tanks lay in pieces. Just before dawn on that Thursday morning, the water tank, 30 feet high and a hundred feet high, had rolled over and snapped its ground mooring. It was full to capacity and within seconds it had flooded the area. Even worse, the cap of the tank had landed on a house. The occupants, Dee Elliott, 44, his wife Eva, 43 and their 18-month-old son Tommie, were killed. His twin, Tony, asleep in another room with his 5-year-old sister survived. Their neighbour Steve Gallegos, 13, wasn’t so lucky. While his mother and sister were trapped by debris and pieces of metal in their house, Steve was thrown 100 feet and his body found in the street.

The chaos was widespread. 15 houses, made of adobe, literally dissolved in the torrent. A city warehouse containing two and three-ton tractors was shifted 175 feet off its foundation. A laundry, wedding shop, welding shop, used car lot and the Mason Motor Co were badly damaged. The only saving grace was that if it had happened during business hours the death toll would have undoubtedly been higher.

In the aftermath a number of theories were advanced for the disaster from a meteor strike to sabotage, but a report by the New Mexico Society of Professional Engineers discovered a more prosaic reason. It found that a faulty weld in the lower section of the tank wall had given way with catastrophic effect; the tragedy is that this was entirely avoidable. The City had purchased the tank from the government after it had been used during the construction of the nearby Conchas Dam and had erected it in around 1940. The tank was not built to the standards of the American Water Works Association; it had never been intended to hold water and was made of lightweight steel, designed to store oil. The surprise was that it had held millions of gallons of water for eleven years before effectively imploding.