From The Pueblo Chieftain (Chris Woodka):
The state is working on repairing a projected $2 billion damage to infrastructure caused by flooding in September. While roads, homes and other buildings were lost to raging waters, mainly in the northern part of the state, there was also severe damage to water structures.
“A lot of the focus is on the recovery of water structures,” Alan Hamel, chairman of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, told the Arkansas Basin Roundtable Wednesday. “The CWCB is spending a lot of time there.”
Structures were damaged both in the South Platte and Arkansas River basins and low-interest loans are available from the CWCB in both areas, said Rebecca Mitchell, of the CWCB staff. The storms lasted for several days and damaged at least 27 dams, 25 stream gauges and 220 diversion structures, Hamel said.
“Many of those diversion structures are owned by private ditch companies and are not covered by any federal funding,” Hamel said.
In some cases, stream courses changed, making diversion structures useless, he added.
From the Estes Park Trail-Gazette (David Persons):
If you see a group of people in blue shirts or vests walking through your neighborhood from time to time, don’t be alarmed. These people – part of the Colorado Spirit Mountain Outreach Team – are just checking up on you and your neighbors to see if you’re OK or having any difficulty related to September’s flood. Their task is to offer flood survivors whatever counseling or guidance they might require. Their effort isn’t going to be short-lived either. They plan to keep on checking on you and your neighbors for up to a year…
Gaarder and his four-person counseling team have been assigned to the mountain region which includes Estes Park, Drake, Glen Haven, Allenspark, Pinewood Springs, Big Elk Meadows and other area communities. Currently, the team headquarters in the Disaster Recovery Center in the Rocky Mountain Park Inn, 101 S. St. Vrain Ave., in the same room with FEMA representatives. Gaarder said the team is averaging about 110 contacts a week…
The emotional side of the flood event is another area where the outreach team can help survivors.
“Some people just need to talk about the experience,” said team member George Desjardins. “Some had no damage but just the magnitude of what happened can be emotionally overwhelming.”[…]
If you would like to contact the outreach team, you can call 970-494-4245 or e-mail the team at COFloodRecovery13@gmail.com.
From KUNC (Luke Runyon):
Farmers and ranchers are tallying just how expensive September’s flooding will be for Colorado’s agriculture economy. Estimates are quickly adding up to tens of millions of dollars. It’ll be a drop in the bucket for the state’s overall farm economy. But for the individual farmers pushed out of their homes and kept out of their fields, the flood’s effects are still very real and costly…
This year was a challenge even before the flood. Hail in August stripped ears of corn and pummeled vegetable farms. Crippling summer heat didn’t help either. Then debris carried by the high water littered fields throughout the South Platte River Basin. In two months time, [Glenn Werning], along with his family and friends, have managed to tear out the floors from inside their decades-old homestead. Soaked insulation is piled up outside and his chimney is sinking into the ground…
On their farm situated at the confluence of the South Platte and Big Thompson Rivers, Werning and his sons lost about 25 acres of corn, a relatively small amount. A recent report from Colorado State University estimates 7,500 acres lost in the South Platte River basin, including corn, hay and sugar beets. That could cost Colorado farmers upwards of $5.5 million. That figure doesn’t count the cost to fix miles of fencing, track down missing livestock and to clear sand bars that materialized in fields…
Expensive irrigation systems were also damaged in the flooding. Without reliable water, many farmers can’t grow profitable crops. Closer to the foothills, streams like the St. Vrain River and Left Hand Creek rerouted themselves leaving some irrigation systems without a connection to the flowing water…
The price tag to fix just the irrigation lines along the St. Vrain and Left Hand Creek alone will approach $16 million…
Glenn Werning and his neighbors received a grant to fix up their tattered water delivery system. Those fixes will need to be finished before next spring’s planting.
From KUNC (Grace Hood):
he rainfall that led to September’s floods in Colorado has been described as “biblical.” State Climatologist Nolan Doesken is trying to quantify that description. Flooded watersheds were dotted with rain gauges. Now that the preliminary deadline has passed for the Colorado Climate Center’s efforts to gather rainfall totals, scientists have precise estimates of rainfall totals…
Inside places the like Four Mile Canyon and the High Park Fire burn zones, Doesken says it was a happy accident that researchers had installed instruments and stream gauges.
Right now one key question is how the storm could have been better predicted. At the National Weather Service in Boulder, forecasters like Chad Gimmestad knew large amounts of rain were coming, but pinpointing exact locations was challenging.
“We didn’t really know until a few hours in advance when the thunderstorms were starting to develop,” he Gimmestad said.
Two months after September’s historic flooding, scientists are evaluating computer forecast models against what happened to see why some of their models failed.
The U.S. Geological Survey is also crunching data that could be used to regulate development and design of future infrastructure in flood plains. The USGS Colorado Water Science Center expects to release this data in the next few weeks.
A project that will take longer is replacing about 24 stream gauges that were damaged in the flooding…
Perhaps the most difficult question will be determining what role climate change played in the September floods. Doesken says he can’t finish a presentation on Colorado’s flooding without an audience member asking about it.
“Mostly it’s not related to climate change,” he said. “[It’s] possibly an incremental enhancement, but a small increment.”
Meanwhile, Reclamation’s operation of Olympus Dam on the Big Thompson was a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for the dam which was not designed for flood control. Here’s a report from Patrick Malone writing for the Fort Collins Coloradoan Here’s an excerpt:
Man stood by, mostly powerless, while nature imposed its will by flooding the Big Thompson Canyon for two days in September. The Olympus Dam at Estes Park was the lone exception. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation controlled its flows into the rising waters of the Big Thompson River. At its peak, the release rate from the dam was 66 times greater than normal for mid-September. Residents of the flood-ravaged canyon wonder how releases from the dam affected the magnitude of the flood…
In hindsight, people whose business is water say the dam releases were a negligible factor in the river’s rise, although emergency communications during peak flooding told a different story.
“I don’t really think the releases had a huge impact on the flows,” said David Nettles, an engineer with the Colorado Department of Natural Resources’ water division. “I think it may have had a small, positive impact. But overall, I think its impact one way or the other was probably pretty minimal.”
The Bureau of Reclamation released water from Olympus Dam at about the same rate that Lake Estes was filling with rain, according to spokeswoman Kara Lamb…
Essentially, Nettles said, that strategy resulted in a neutral relationship between dam releases and downstream flows in the Big Thompson River.
“Once the reservoir is full and you’re passing inflows, it’s pretty much like the reservoir is not there,” Nettles said. “If you’re passing the inflows, the reservoir has no impact.”[…]
Now that the floodwaters have subsided, Brunner said she and others who own property or live in the Big Thompson Canyon want a formal, scientific assessment of the dam’s role in the magnitude of the flood…
The Bureau of Reclamation has questions of its own, and plans to assess how the disaster was managed at the Olympus Dam.