Click the link to read the article on the Montrose Daily Press website (Katharhynn Heidelberg). Here’s an excerpt:
When Luz Marquez returned to her Heritage Estates home off Marine Road Wednesday morning, she was prepared for an ordinary day. What she found was water — lots of it, pooling in her backyard, flowing under a raised shed, and carving small trenches through her parking area to dump the gravel there into the street…
Montrose County had been anticipating flooding this year, based on high snowpack and the potential for a quick melt and runoff. The county was getting sand and sandbags ready for distribution, cleaning ditches and had a contractor lined up for the work. But the water came even sooner than expected.
“It came a little quicker than we thought,” Montrose County Road and Bridge Superintendent Brandon Wallace said, as he and other county staff worked at Heritage Estates. “We watched all night and it decided it really wanted to release. We were trying to get a game plan to clear out some of these drainage ditches cleaned out to alleviate some of this water.”
Montrose County was on alert for weeks, in light of intense snowpack, which just weeks ago stood at record highs in parts of the Gunnison River Basin…The water came roaring about a week sooner than was expected, upending the county’s plans to clear out drainage ditches when things are a bit drier. “The water just beat us to it. We really thought we had a little bit bigger window to get it cleaned when it was dry,” Hawkins said.