Colorado Flooding
POSTED BY: BYTEMITE
UPDATED: Monday, April 7, 2025 14:40
VIEWED: 4193
PAGE 2 of 3
Mal4's okay--she lives in NY, it's her family in CO, and they're okay too. She's just been busy with school, and FFF has been a "big yawn lately". Kinda been finding it that way myself, and having fun on the dog carting sites, so I haven't been around much either. She says she'll come back up for air by Winter break, so she's accounted for, thank goodness. My heart goes out to those people, big time!
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My sister lives near Boulder and my aunt lives in Longmont. Both are safe (as are their families) and their homes are intact, but they're both floored by the amount of damage all around them. My aunt sent me a link to an article that calls this a thousand-year flood, as in once in a thousand years. They can't go anywhere since most of the roads are either washed out or unstable; even the emergency vehicles are having trouble getting around. The whole thing is mind-boggling.
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Glad that Mal4's family is okay.
Quote:
Originally posted by SAVEWASH:
My aunt sent me a link to an article that calls this a thousand-year flood
Damn, I was hearing 500-year flood, but I can easily believe it's 1000-year. Glad to hear your family is also okay.
Apparently, the national guard has told Estes Park residents that if they have anywhere else to go, they need to go there. As far as I know, they haven't used the actual phrase "Abandon your homes for the time being" but that seems to be what they're getting at. There's no power, no water lines, and no reliable food supply, and there probably won't be for some time. Basically, it will be difficult to survive winter up there. They've started airlifting people out of the area, and are saying that the last airlift rescue this size they had was Katrina. I'm seriously doubting those mountain towns will ever be the same. Don't even know if the state as a whole will be the same. At this point I doubt I could even guesstimate how many billions of dollars in damage has been done.
Oh, and it rained again today. I think we've probably now exceeded our annual rainfall in the space of a week.
Scattered showers forecasted through Wednesday.
What reason had proved best ceased to look absurd to the eye, which shows how idle it is to think anything ridiculous except what is wrong.
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Here's the link: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2013/09/12/colorado-deluge-co
uld-be-classified-as-a-1000-year-event/
It's hard to process the extent of the damage there.
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Glad, no, more than glad you're okay.
SGG
Quote:
Originally posted by PhoenixRose:
There aren't many other Coloradoans on this site, but I'm doing okay. I sort of live on a hill and I'm not near any rivers. The state as a whole, though, is in bad shape. What I'm seeing on the news is only the worst of it, like Boulder Creek and the St. Vrain river, but there isn't a river in central or northern Colorado that isn't flooding as far as I can tell. The Poudre in Fort Collins, the Big Thompson in Estes Park and Loveland, Ralston Creek in Arvada, and countless other bodies of water have overflowed their banks. By miles. Entire sections of highway up the mountains are simply gone. Every major school district is shut down, either because they're flooded or too many roads are closed for them to function. Same with universities. Phone communication has been knocked out in several cities. Rescue helicopters have been flying over my house, probably towards Lyons and Estes Park, which have between zero and one roadway out of them.
The sun came out today, though. Unfortunately, that's likely to be a temporary condition and it might rain again on Sunday.
As to any relation to wildfires... well,I don't know, but average annual rainfall for the state is around 15" and there are areas that got that much in the last two days, and most other areas got close to 2/3 that amount. It's a semi-arid state, and it's just not built for that much water to come through it. The ground got saturated and the rivers swelled and burst. A lot of the soil is clay, which can't be helping the mudslides and rockslides in the mountains. Roads and bridges are sliding away all over the place in a similar manner. Trees are halfway submerged or torn out of the ground. Nothing could have really stopped that.
So yeah, it's bad. I'm not personally trapped in my city, but it will certainly be difficult to get farther than 10 to 30 miles in any given direction for the foreseeable future. I assume repairing the interstates will be the first priority, but that could easily take months.
What reason had proved best ceased to look absurd to the eye, which shows how idle it is to think anything ridiculous except what is wrong.
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I do believe I heard something to that effect, that the wildfires did have some bearing on the floods. It kind of makes sense since much of the forest has been burned away and there's little-to-no buffer from the torrential rains. Imagine, dams have overflowed. That would definitely affect the landscape.
SGG
Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Looking for safety report from Colorado browncoats, and speculations about whether the floods are in any way connected to the wildfires last year.
Hope people are okay.
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Same here Niki, my heart and good thoughts go out to those folk in Colorado.
SGG
Quote:
Originally posted by Niki2:
Well, I for one am glad to see that terrifying space monkey and know she's okay. I haven't heard much--been avoiding the news except on the internet for quite some time now and tend to shy away from the details, they sadden me so.
And yes, fires ALWAYS make the next season's flooding worse, as So. Ca.!
I hope things settle down and my heart goes out to those involved...and now I'm worried about Mal4, too...
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Thanks for the concern guys. It's nice to be thought of. :)
My parents were out of town for most of this. They got back last night and said their neighborhood is OK, except one sinkhole opened and swallowed a driveway. I can imagine what Manitou Springs looks like now though. I've seen it flood in spring runoff. What a mess, with all that red mud!
To folks who live there: Vermont got hammered by flooding from TS Irene a few years back, with roads and covered bridges and lots of homes and businesses washed away and the familiar landscape all torn up. It was heart breaking, but I was back up there this summer and it's largely recovered. No matter how bad it looks now, you'll get your nice CO valleys and creeks back.
Just stay safe!
*---------------------------------------*
The French Revolution would have never happened if Marie Antoinette had just given every peasant an iPhone.
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Good to hear from you (also I am apparently terrible at remembering things whoops).
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Good to see you, Mal4, and glad your family's okay.
Back in '81 we experienced some of that. NOTHING like on that scale, but we've got so many hills that flooding can make an awful mess. On our street, a mudslide came roaring down the hill, swept our VW bus into the next-door-neighbor's Mercedes and landed both of them up on his lawn, took down two homes above us (one lady died), filled the garage of one home below to the ceiling with mud and debris, and stranded us all for about two days. The memories of those two days are etched firmly in my mind and will never go away. I think memories of those kinds of things stick with everyone, to refer back to when they hear about stuff like what's happening now.
All of Marin was hurting because a big slide on 101 took out our only freeway and only access to the Golden Gate, and flooding further North cut 101 off from that direction.
Poor Inverness took it worst in that way; they're out on Pt. Reyes and only connected to the continent by a narrow causeway. They were completely cut off for a couple of weeks, no power, so the entire community got together and had huge get-togethers to eat all the food in the markets before it spoiled. Great sense of community, and they're tough folk out there, but we felt for them!
None of what happened to us held a candle to what CO is going through, but we got just enough of a taste of it that my heart aches for them.
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