I got some flood reports from people I know in Boulder. They all said – water in the basements, no other damage, no wall of water, wildly exaggerated by the press, life back to normal today.
Estes Park has some serious problems though, because it is a tourist town and the roads are washed out.
“Estes Park has some serious problems though, because it is a tourist town and the roads are washed out.”
The main problem is the tourists.
Their economy is completely based on tourism. They are in a lot of trouble.
As long as people build or even camp out on flood plains, there will always be periodic flood disasters.
Somehow this site popped up when I did a google search…I was looking for an organization that has been set up to help people who have been impacted by the flooding. This blog post seems to downplay the situation. There was a 30 ft walk of water that came down one of the smaller canyons but when it reached the larger Boulder Canyon, it flattened out. Yes, the press got a bit up in arms about it but this doesn’t mean there isn’t extreme devastation in Colorado. 15 Counties were declared as part of the federal disaster area on Saturday in an area the size of the state of CT. There’s been a request to add 10 more counties to the disaster area given that the flooding is moving east. 1,500 homes have been destroyed. 20,000 have been damaged. The amount of rain that fell was something like 3-4 times the previous records for 24 hour period and one week period. So people are calling it a 500 year flood because “100 year flood” doesn’t even begin to address what has taken place. So the rather rude comment about “people build or even camp out of flood plains” comes from a lack of information — hopefully this clarifies a bit. Also, there’s much damage in the foothills due to mudslides.
The thing with flooding is that it’s very specific to certain areas — generally close to drainages. So there are also many tens of thousands of people in the area who have dry basements and weren’t taken out by mudslides.
“Life back to normal”…hmm. Yes there’s certainly people in this situation. There are also school districts in some of the dozens of cities impacted that are closed for this week due to no sewage system or no drinking water. And then there’s the estimate — which could certainly be an exaggeration that 1 in 4 small businesses in CO will fail as a result of this flood. Even it’s 1 in 10, that’s not “life back to normal” for an awful lot of people.
As for Estes, there is a lot of damage there — lots of different kinds of damage. They’ve evacuated areas where people have homes and told them not to come back for months. Significant infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. Then there’s Jamestown — no infrastructure there. Then there’s the highways into the mountains. City after city… I can count 7 highways that go up canyons — which are drainages. Miles of highways destroyed across the canyons. The road bed is frequently completed gone and replaced by river bed. It will take years to repair and all those homes that are in those canyons cannot be inhabited. Thousands of people can’t get in to get their stuff because the roads are impassable and will be for months. Then there’s all the bridges and roads out in the plains that are destroyed….dozens of bridges and a couple hundred miles of highway. The flooding extends out to the Colorado border now so it’s halfway across the state.
Perhaps you’d say that Katrina was overblown too. Or Hurricane Sandy.
Perhaps government agencies should provide accurate information, instead of wildly exaggerating. It would benefit everyone.