Recent work suggests that local water governance is in part a function of histories of human responses to water crises. In this article, a specific example is described to develop that argument, namely, the effort to control flooding caused by urban development in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the 1950s and 1960s. The description of this single case will show contingencies in the production of conflict, the importance of population worldview in that conflict, and the way that different levels of governance scale collapse into a single local event. Authors outline a dynamic crisis-driven model to generalize the New Mexico case for future comparative analysis.