The boards were dumped in this neighborhood 50 miles northeast of Denver by torrents of water that surged from the Little Thompson River five years ago this week, during what is now deemed the state’s costliest natural disaster. The detritus behind his house reminds Vega each day of the struggle he endured trying to come back from the flood of 2013 — blamed for taking nine lives, destroying 1,852 homes and causing $4 billion in damage across two dozen Colorado counties.
“I made it,” the 63-year-old retired construction worker, who lives in Milliken with his wife and two grandchildren, said with conviction as tears welled in his eyes. “I feel happy because I made it.”
The interior of Vega’s home today betrays no sign of the storm, which dumped a year’s worth of precipitation in less than a week as summer came to a close in 2013. Creeks and rivers running east from the mountains swelled and widened, mercilessly plowing over roads and bridges, through neighborhoods and across farm fields — hitting Boulder, Weld and Larimer counties the hardest.
The storm sent 2 feet of water into Vega’s mobile home, leaving behind soaked drywall, ruined mattresses, waterlogged furniture and piles of mud throughout. But three months of hard work jacking up the structure, laying new wooden flooring and installing fresh walls inside his home, where Vega has lived since 1980, made the place habitable again.
“I looked at it in my mind and I said, ‘I think I can fix it,’ ” Vega said last week as his granddaughter played video games in their modest living room. “I have God in my life, and he was the one giving me the strength.”
Strength is a common theme five years after the rains began falling on Sept. 9, 2013, marking the start of a cataclysmic 100-year flood event. More than 17 inches of rain fell over parts of Boulder County, and, by the night of Sept. 11, the ground was saturated and waterways large and small had become overwhelmed.
Nearly 120 lane miles of state highways were damaged or destroyed, cutting off access to entire communities, including Jamestown, Lyons and Estes Park. Farmers and ranchers on the Eastern Plains took a huge hit too, suffering $55 million in damage across 67,000 acres, according to a post-flood report prepared by the state this past spring. More than 18,000 homes suffered some level of damage from the flood.
In the wake of that unprecedented destruction, the rebuilding effort since 2013 has been monumental. Upward of $2 billion in federal, state and local money has been allocated to flood recovery, with approximately $350 million coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and $320 million disbursed in federal block grants.
At the lower end of the assistance spectrum, state disaster unemployment assistance provided $710,000 in relief, while $167,000 in private funds went toward restoring outdoor recreation facilities, parks and trails.
A total of 117 watershed recovery projects, totaling 65 miles of river and floodplain improvements in the flood zone, have been completed, said Natriece Bryant, chief administrative officer for the Colorado Department of Local Affairs.
“Colorado is stronger now,” Bryant said. “Because of this.”
Building back stronger
Nowhere is that more apparent than on the roads and highways that crisscross the flood zone. Jared Fiel, a spokesman for the Colorado Department of Transportation, said roads that got chewed up, sliced apart or pulverized by floodwaters have been or will be rebuilt stronger than they were before. He calls the effort to build better an “overall mindshift” for the agency.
“Do you just build the road back and let it wash out again?” he asked. “Resiliency has worked its way into everything we do.”
In the Big Thompson Canyon, which officially reopened in full in May after several years of flood repairs, Fiel said U.S. 34 was rerouted — with the construction of a new bridge — to avoid a curve that had washed out in the 1976 flood that killed nearly 150 people and again during the 2013 deluge.
“We realized Mother Nature wanted that curve, so we gave it to her,” he said.
Again on U.S. 34, between Kersey and Greeley this time, CDOT built a bridge where there hadn’t been one before. Not because there was a need to span a creek or river, Fiel said, but because the area was prone to water accumulation during hard rains.
“We built a bridge over that area knowing it’s going to flood again,” he said.
Fiel said efforts for work crews throughout the flood zone focused on blasting down to bedrock before reconstructing a section of road, giving it a better ability to withstand rushing waters. There also are plans to raise Interstate 25 over the Poudre River to make overtopping of the busy highway less likely during future rainstorms.
Approximately $746 million — $708 million of which came from the Federal Highway Administration’s emergency fund — has been targeted for road repairs, Fiel said. One hundred ten emergency repair projects, costing $130 million, took care of immediate transportation infrastructure needs in the months following the flood. Since then, CDOT has been working on 32 permanent repair projects, 17 of which have been completed.
Nine more are under construction and six will go out to bid later this fall. Work is expected to wrap up sometime in 2020, he said.
“I know a lot of people think it’s taking a long time, but we are moving at light speed,” Fiel said. “The enormity of this event can’t be overstated.”
Drag the slider to compare before-and-after images. To see more before-and-after photos, click here.
“We’re about to wake up”
It’s an enormity that is still very much a part of Mark and Sylvia Dane’s lives. The couple, who are in their 60s, live in Boulder County’s rugged Fourmile Canyon. The road outside their home is filled with heavy trucks hauling road material up and down the canyon, as repairs to the hard-hit area continue half a decade after flood waters receded.
Flaggers still direct motorists through construction zones up and down the canyon, an annoyance that has led several of their neighbors to lose their patience and get nasty with the crews fixing the road, the Danes said.
Any day now, the couple expects to get a $180,000 concrete bridge built where a temporary one — a 6-foot diameter metal culvert topped by a wooden deck — has stood since an oversubscribed Fourmile Creek sent waves of water past their home of 35 years and took out the access across the creek to their property.
“It was bank-to-bank water,” Mark Dane said last week, pointing to an area along the creek’s edge where he was busy grading dirt in anticipation of the bridge work.
Things have come far for the Danes since that September week five years ago, when Mark Dane helped transport his wife by riding a lawnmower down the Switzerland Trail to a clearing near Salina, where Black Hawk helicopters airlifted stranded residents to safety. But he said the prolonged repair work in the canyon has, in some cases, set neighbor upon neighbor, as disputes mount over construction permits and boundary adjustments.
“It’s like PTSD from the whole event,” he said.
The Danes’ new bridge to their home is being paid for through a $7.5 million disaster community development block grant program. Garry Sanfaçon, Boulder County’s flood recovery manager, said it is one of 11 driveway bridges that still need to be rebuilt in the county — 22 broken spans already have been replaced.
The last bridge probably won’t go in until next summer, Sanfaçon said.
Bureaucracy is largely responsible for extending some of the work well past the flood itself, he said. Complex contracting and procurement rules means there is a $28 million gap between what Boulder County has requested from the federal government ($132 million) and what it has received ($104 million).
“A lot of the heavy lifting involves making appeals to FEMA for eligibility for reimbursement for our projects, which is very frustrating,” Sanfaçon said. “It’s very trying — it’s not the glamorous part of the recovery.”
Nor is moving dirt with a Bobcat as storm clouds move in, as they did last week, leaving Mark Dane with an increasingly narrow window of time in which to prepare his land for the new crossing. But once the bridge is in place, the Danes feel like they’ll finally have the light at the end of the 2013 flood tunnel in their sights.
“It’s like a bad dream now,” Mark Dane said, “and we’re about to wake up.”
Drag the slider to compare before-and-after images. To see more before-and-after photos, click here.
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