The damage was devastating, with homes ruined, bridges washed out and roadways rendered impassable. Even today, the recovery is not complete. But it is well underway — and it has brought with it lessons for emergency managers in Colorado and around the country.
Boulder’s recovery began well before the 2013 flood even happened. Both the city and county of Boulder have had flood mitigation efforts in place for years, said Mike Chard, director of the Boulder Office of Emergency Management, which was established by a joint agreement between the city of Boulder and Boulder County.
“The efforts have been around hardening infrastructure, enforcing codes, land use — really being prepared for a flood,” Chard said. Bridges were designed to withstand floods, for example, and building codes kept hazardous materials from being stored in flood plains, helping prevent a much worse disaster.
The city of Boulder also completed its annual infrastructure assessment. This proved invaluable after the flood when it came time to apply for federal aid, said Kurt Bauer, engineering project manager for the city, whose responsibilities include flood mitigation: “We were able to walk around with FEMA with an iPad showing them where the infrastructure was” even if it had been completely destroyed.
In some cases, the contrast between preparation and lack thereof taught authorities valuable lessons. For example, Chard said, they have long known that Boulder Creek presented a flood risk, so mitigation work had taken place there.
“Smaller drainages didn’t have as much mitigation,” he said. When the 2013 flood happened, “every drainage in our county from north to south was activated and flooding. Some had not flooded in 100 years or more. Some had never flooded like that before.”
The damage assessment after the flood illustrated the value of the mitigation efforts, Chard said. “What it did prove out was that the mitigation projects and efforts that were in place did in fact make a difference in protecting the infrastructure. In the more mitigated areas, we still found some damage, but less of it.”
In the Eye of the Storm
Despite the planning, the scope of the flood took everyone by surprise. The plans anticipated that one or two drainages in the county would flood. Having every drainage flood was what Chard called the “doomsday scenario.” “We had four days of nonstop flooding,” he said. Flash flooding in mountain canyons was exacerbated by landslides. The ground became saturated. And there were many layers of complexity in responding to the disaster.
“We were doing what we could to get emergency crews in to help people, but many people were on their own,” Chard said. Low cloud cover made it difficult to fly helicopters. “All the canyons had flooded, and we had no access.”
The plans for emergency shelters weren’t working because flooded roads prevented people from getting to the shelters. The flooding was so widespread that there weren’t enough unaffected areas left to help those who were impacted.
Emergency managers turned to a “strong multiagency coordinating group” that engaged nonprofits, the private sector and public agencies.
“We had the ability to connect all those people — we were building capabilities on the fly,” Chard said. “When you’re off script, you need a lot of help from your friends.”
On Sept. 13, 2013, rain-swollen Boulder Creek flows around a marker showing historic flood levels in the city. APImages.com
When they moved past the emergency response into recovery, however, cracks started to appear. “The emergency response process was incredible: well coordinated and well rehearsed,” said Chris Meschuk, flood recovery coordinator for community services for the city of Boulder, referring to the joint city-county Office of Emergency Management. “What we don’t have is that sort of process for long-term recovery.”
For example, there was no counterpart to the multiagency coordinating group for the entities engaged in long-term recovery efforts. One way officials are hoping to change this is by creating a local VOAD, which stands for Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters. This network will help connect area relief agencies and government emergency managers. “So when a disaster happens we’re not cold-calling organizations and they’re not cold-calling the government — we already know each other,” Meschuk said.
Recovery Begins
Although handling the immediate crisis was critical, emergency management personnel also started planning for what would happen when the rain stopped. “We started the longer-term recovery planning during the event: You start planning, thinking, organizing even during the actual emergency,” said Garry Sanfacon, Boulder County flood recovery manager, whose job focuses on medium- and long-term recovery. It was a complicated effort, requiring coordination among such areas as land use, permitting, road construction, debris removal and home buyout programs.
The EOC was activated for two weeks straight, Chard said. The office had plans for recovery and cleaning up debris, but “the recovery plan didn’t necessarily work as well as we thought.”
“It gave us an idea of where we needed to start,” said Chard. They wanted to quickly settle into a traditional recovery model with short-, medium- and long-term objectives. But they soon discovered that the aftermath of a disaster as large as the flood didn’t fit neatly into those categories.
With some improvising, they were able to accomplish some tasks as planned. For example, one critical immediate task was assessing the damage. With many roads still impassable, this proved difficult.
“We needed to get preliminary numbers to base the recovery efforts on: the number of people impacted, structures down, businesses affected, debris amounts,” said Andrew Notbohm, an emergency management coordinator for Boulder, whose duties include recovery and assessment. In some cases, a drive that normally took half an hour would take an hour and a half. “That was quite an undertaking,” he said. The damage “was so vast, it was hard to know where to send people. [In some places], the creek or stream had completely changed — it was not in the original channel. That was really a challenge for access.”
Within four days, emergency managers had a preliminary assessment. They used that to determine where to send multidisciplinary teams to gather public health information and other specifics that would be helpful as the recovery progressed. Chard said Boulder County had 10,000 homes affected by water and more than 50 miles of road destroyed, including major bridges.
But it became clear that not all the recovery needs were going to proceed in such an orderly way.
“One of the lessons we learned right away is that there are things not talked about — unmet needs,” Chard said. Some victims initially found shelter with friends or had temporary housing paid for by insurance, for example, only to have that short-term solution end a few weeks later. Others used their credit cards to buy what they needed initially, but then required a safety net when those cards were maxed out. Emergency managers had to set up structures to help with these unmet needs before they could make progress in other areas.
“Once we did that, we were able to really accomplish the mission,” said Chard.
An additional complication: Nature keeps going even after the flood is over.
“I’ve got every creek and stream in the county destroyed and spring runoff happening in April,” Chard said. “If we don’t get these creeks and streams cleaned out, they’ll flood again.”
Workers who assessed more than 120 miles of creeks and rivers — documenting high-hazard debris, for example — worked tirelessly to complete the assessments in less than 60 days, Chard said.
The “heroic undertaking” by city workers to prepare for the spring runoff “really saved the day for many residents,” he said. Without it, there would have been even more flooding, debris and damage. “This was all going on after the original event.”
After the initial work was done, officials could look at longer-term improvements, both in terms of flood mitigation and coordination among offices. One concern: how to shift away from what Chard described as a “surge mentality,” when everyone pitches in to help during a disaster, then goes back to their regular work.
“The burden on the staff is heavy,” he said. “How do we sustain this if we’re talking about climate change? Is the new normal that we’re going to be dealing with this stuff all the time?”
Sanfacon said that for unincorporated Boulder County, the cost of public reconstruction is an estimated $250 million. “Most of that is road construction, bridges and infrastructure,” he said. The figure does not include damage to private property that’s being paid for by insurance companies or property owners.
Most of the money for rebuilding is coming from the federal government through FEMA or the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Sanfacon said. The state and local taxpayers have provided matching funds.
Lessons Learned
The city’s planning department was one of the agencies that started working on the recovery while the floods were still occurring — and one agency that started learning early about what parts of its process could be improved, Meschuk said. “Even during the flood, we started having conference calls, talking as a department about what it was going to mean when we reopened services.” Some of the issues involved continuity of operations — for example, could they use their regular facility? 
In Boulder County, Lyons was hit hard by the flooding, with all access points into the town being blocked. APImages.com
“It was learning on the fly,” Meschuk said. “One of the biggest lessons learned is that we did not have a good formal disaster recovery plan.” The emergency plans worked well, but they realized they had not done enough planning for the aftermath.
One example: collecting debris that was on private property. “The original plan was community collection sites, and within hours they were full,” Meschuk said. “We had to pivot to curbside collection.”
Officials learned several other lessons as the recovery progressed:
- Information management — including sharing information among agencies — is critical. The city was doing damage assessments, FEMA was processing requests for individual assistance and other agencies were responding to survivors’ needs. “Being able to coordinate all of that so that residents don’t get assessed and visited multiple times and so that it’s clear what the needs are in the community” is critical, Meschuk said. “We’re working through that, and it’s going to be a long-term process.”
- Having someone in the recovery coordinator role is critical, Sanfacon said. This not only helps government departments work together, it also can help survivors navigate the different organizations trying to help them.
- Providing one resource for these survivors proved very helpful, allowing people who needed help to get information about everything from permits to roads to septic tanks in one place.
- The aftermath proved the benefits of cooperation as well. “This flood has brought all the communities in Boulder County together in a much more robust way than we were before,” Sanfacon said. For example, rather than have the city and county apply separately to the state for the federal funding it was distributing, they submitted a joint proposal.
- Navigating federal aid can be complicated. For example, Bauer said, “FEMA has different divisions, and they don’t all see eye to eye on criteria.” On one hand, FEMA encourages communities to become more resilient. However, restrictions on the use of recovery funding required that structures simply be replaced the way they were, not improved. “Why put back something that didn’t work?” Bauer asked.
As they process these lessons, officials are also looking to the future.
“If you walked around Boulder, some people would never even know that there was a flood here,” Sanfacon said. But outside the city, road reconstruction, bridge rebuilding and creek restoration are still underway. Some residents who may never be able to return home are still working on getting help from the home buyout program.
“We’re in the middle of our long-term recovery,” Sanfacon said.
