I'm surprised no one has posted anything from the area.

The biggest surprise to me wasn't that canyons have flash floods but that the bridges over the rivers down in the flats have proven to be too short.

Movement N-S thru the affected areas has been difficult as flood waters overtopped bridges that span gulleys that have been known as seeps or dry as long as anyone can remember.

Authorities have responded in well-organized ways and the police/fire/NG comms interoperability has worked really well.
Since the emergency covers so many jurisdictions mutual aid was difficult.

Agencies ran out of barriers to post to prevent people driving into overtopping waters. They also ran out of people to man barricades.

And people came out to stand on the compromised bridges and play in the water......

My long commute to/from work entirely thru the affected area will be more difficult in future. But that's peanuts compared to coworkers who lost their houses or will have to leave their houses for the winter after they are helo'd out.

Glad you are OK. I hope our other members from that area come out OK too!

When things settle down a bit, I hope some of you folks from that area can post some more details about your experiences, and lessons learned for the rest of us.

I thought I had seen a post last night here but when I went back this morning to read it, I could not find it. Maybe it was somewhere else.





Apparently they have nothing better to do with their time.

My first cousin and her husband live in Jamestown. The are okay and their home is intact, being offset from Main St and on the opposite side of the road from the creek. And I hear they refused to leave ; ).

Most of us think about the obvious things to prep with. Water, food, clothing, etc. But one thing that caught my eye in the recent floods that I do NOT currently prep for is the destruction of sewage systems. It's bad enough when it backs up into your basement. But then the authorities pronounce a "no flushing toilets for 10+ days" order on the community.

I hadn't previously thought about THAT particular problem...

The problem here now is infrastructure destruction. Many people lost their homes in the initial flooding. Now there will be long term problems due to road and bridge damage, beyond the initial personal property loss.

One of my coworkers lives up in Pinewood Springs.

Pinewood is uphill from Lyons which has been wiped out/ roads destroyed uphill and down from there.

And it's south of Estes Park which is isolated by both highways to it being destroyed.

While Estes Park has a paved escape to the west via the 12,200' (winter is coming!) Trail Ridge Road thru Rocky Mtn National Park Pinewood is cutoff by yet another destroyed road between Pinewood and Estes.

Given all the road repairs that will be needed to restore access to Pinewood, I expect that he'll have to close down his home for winter and leave either via helo lift or by tortuous 4WD roads that will only be allowed to be 1-way.

Not many people are really setup to winter at 9,000' with no access except by muletrain. And muletrains are in short supply.

I also expect that the winter propane deliveries haven't been made up there .... and so on.

Hard, hard decisions ahead.

It's hard to be surprised by a flood in CO unless you are *really* not paying attention. I chose my location (Denver suburb) on a lot of things, and altitude was one of those. Many people love to live in the canyons, despite all the recent history.

It's not rocket science. You can get maps of flood plains from any county office, and canyons are an obvious no-no...

in case any of the younger set missed the nuance of the opening scene of Apocalypse Now.....to dispose of human waste, Army style... cut the bottom 1/3 off a 55gal drum.... weld on a couple of "U" shaped handles... place under your "one holer" latrine... when about 1/3 filled, remove, wait for the wind to be in a direction other than your hooch, add a gallon or so of diesel fuel, and light....

A few years back when the Howard Hansen dam up in the Cascades was at risk of failure in a major storm, flooding the Kent Valley, one of the major risks to my home in Bellevue was sewage backflow all the way from the sewage treatment facility five miles away - my house was well out of the flood plain, but the force of the floodwaters hitting the sewage facility could force sewage back along the pipes into every house connected for miles and miles. We had a sewage backflow value installed to prevent that. No flood, fixed dam, problem solved - at a modicum of cost I had some additional peace of mind against the worst case.