Ten years ago, intense flooding came to Northern Colorado. The floods destroyed homes, roadways and bridges and left Front Range communities dealing with the after effects for years. The disaster left a mark on those who lived through it. To look back at the flooding a decade ago and what's happened since, KUNC’s Nikole Robinson Carroll spoke with Luke Runyon. The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Nikole Robinson Carroll: To start, let's go back to September 2013. Walk me through what happened there.
Luke Runyon: The event started on September 11, 2013. There was this large mass of extremely moist air that was moving into Colorado, and it centered itself right above Boulder and Larimer counties, over the foothills and mountain communities. Flash floods can happen in those places, but this was on a completely different level than your normal flash flood. And the storm basically hung in place for about two days and dropped the equivalent of a year's worth of rain in a matter of days. The rain eventually subsided, but all told, the storm dropped upwards of 18 inches of rain in some parts of Boulder County. And because of where the rain fell up in the mountains and foothills, it kicked off this multi-day flooding event.
Robinson Carroll: And that sounds pretty intense. I wasn't here when that happened, so I'm learning, too. So lots of rain came down in the mountains and foothills over the course of a few days. What did that look like for the communities in the flood path?
Runyon: It was devastating. This still stands as one of the worst natural disasters the state has faced in recent history. And I can just run through some stats to get a picture of that. So, at least nine people were killed. More than $4 billion in damage. More than 19,000 people had to be evacuated and 3,000 more were rescued, some by helicopters that flew into mountain communities that had become stranded when all their roads were destroyed. About 26,000 homes were damaged or destroyed and more than 480 miles of roadways were destroyed or significantly damaged by the flood. And many of the Front Range’s waterways, like Boulder Creek, St. Vrain Creek, Left Hand Creek, the Big Thompson River - they all recorded their highest flows on record. Many communities were really hard-hit, like Estes Park, Lyons, Evans, Longmont, Boulder, Glen Haven, Drake, Pinewood Springs and Kersey. And so the damage wasn't just contained to one area. It was widespread across Northern Colorado from the mountains all the way down to the plains.
Robinson Carroll: What was the response? What did government officials prioritize after the flood receded?
Runyon: Well, you can kind of break things up into two phases. First, you had the recovery phase. This is what you would think of as the traditional disaster response. And that meant getting people who were displaced and evacuated back home, rebuilding roadways and bridges, reconnecting utilities. I remember some communities were without internet or phone service for weeks afterward. The funding to do that work came from a mix of federal and state funds. FEMA had a really strong presence in Colorado for a lot of that work, and that phase probably lasted about three or four years. Then for the next phase, we had a lot of communities stepping back to say, “What can we do to better respond to the next big flood?” Some cities put this under the banner of resiliency, and that's taken all kinds of different forms - some projects to deepen and widen river channels to handle bigger flows, other programs on how to better communicate emergency information during and after natural disasters.
Robinson Carroll: We're now ten years after the flood, and the title for this series is “The Flood That Changed the Front Range.” You and KUNC Reporter Alex Hager have been out reporting in some of the affected communities. What do you see as lingering effects?
Runyon: Well, on the ground, you can see all kinds of ways that communities look and feel different after the flood. Just take Longmont, for example. They've put a lot of time and money into flood mitigation projects along St. Vrain Creek. And the creek just looks and feels very different now than it did before the flood. It's wider. It has new parks along its course. It has this more serpentine shape, less development right in its floodplain, and a lot more native vegetation. I did some reporting there for this series and folks say that kind of a silver lining from the flood is that it reshaped the community's relationship to the St. Vrain for the better. And then also, this was a really intense, powerful moment in communities all throughout the region for people who lived through it. It was a traumatic one. While I was out doing reporting for this series, I talked with one person who had been evacuated during the storm, and she said she feels anxious any time it rains heavily now and just the sound of a big rainstorm can trigger these feelings of anxiety. You know, that's a less visible effect, but I know lots of people on the Front Range who experienced the floods who still hold onto those feelings today.
