One of many
trip reports under the
SilGro home page for Alan Silverstein and Cathie
Grow.
Email me at
ajs@frii.com.
Last update: March 25, 2024
(Previous trip report: 1997_0708_AcrossDivide.htm)
(From email sent to a long list of friends:)
Thanks everyone who asked how my daughter (Megan Silverstein) and I were doing after the flooding in Fort Collins. We're just fine and there was no damage at all in our part of town.
As usual the media, mainly TV, emphasized the unusual and dramatic aspects of the crisis and did a lousy job of putting it in any kind of perspective or providing a big-picture overview. While the damage was widespread and severe, and at last count [that morning] five people died and 16 are missing [no further deaths reported later], the flood only affected a tiny fraction of the structures in town; less than 100 destroyed and a few hundred damaged. But this included major damage at CSU ($40M), wiping out half of the collection in their brand new library.
As you might expect, the reporting caused quite a clog in the local phone system all day yesterday as people all over the country tried to get through to their friends and relatives in the area. Yes this did hamper some efforts to help people after the incident, at least as I saw it from the Red Cross office.
Most of the flooding came down the very small Spring Creek drainage and some related irrigation ditches. Apparently the Poudre River ran high but not into flood stage. Horsetooth Reservoir collected about 5000 acre feet of water and was very high, but not threatened.
For your amusement, here's the story of my involvement in the crisis.
I stayed late at work Monday evening (July 28) and drove home in rain at about 8:30 pm. We got about 1.5" at my house (southeast Fort Collins), a lot at once for mid-summer, but nothing too unusual, and we needed the water anyway.
I was just falling asleep a bit before midnight when a friend (Jenny Pruett) called me to come help bail out her house. (She lived near an elevated irrigation ditch west of Taft Hill Road, south of Prospect Road.) At first I couldn't comprehend what she was saying about the water being too high to drive down her street! I decided that even if I couldn't help much, I should at least lose some sleep to go see it for myself. I gathered some stuff, including snow shovels at her request, and headed over.
Well I couldn't believe what I saw in the dark. Driving over there most of the town looked normal, just wet after heavy rain, but Spring Creek crossing Drake Road was wider than the road and nearly up to the bridge, a roaring torrent! It had apparently been even higher just an hour or two earlier, there was debris on the roadway. It reminded me of a whitewater river in western Colorado or Utah. [In hindsight driving across the bridge might have been a bad idea!]
I had to park four houses up the street from my friend's house, where the asphalt went underwater, and carry my shopvac down from there. She was lucky, sort of -- mainly wet carpets and exterior damage, including a ripped-away chain link fence. The water was already down a foot or two, and receding, when I arrived.
Anyway within about an hour police and firefolk showed up and we had to evacuate because the irrigation ditch behind her house was breeching its walls and threatening to raise the water level again. It made an incredible noise in the darkness. Fortunately although the water continued to pour over the ditch walls all night, they never completely collapsed. (The next day an amazing amount of heavy machinery showed up in her cul-de-sac to repair the ditch before more rain predicted for that evening!)
Before we had to leave her house we did manage to roll three of the four cars in her driveway up the street out of the water and get them draining. Unfortunately she'd had had several houseguests that evening, and nobody realized the water was rising until it was too late and the cars were already halfway submerged. One (nearly new) was totalled, one was probably OK with lots of work, and two were in pretty good shape. The water in the street was literally knee-deep, with debris floating in it like blankets and firewood.
After taking my friend to another friend's house for the night, I checked in on ham radio at about 2:30 am and was asked to proceed to the Red Cross chapter office to assist with radio and phone communications. (I'd had a little Red Cross training and some past volunteer experience.)
The next twelve hours were nearly beyond description: Chaotic, complicated, and busy. Phone calls came from all over the country offering help, looking for news about friends, wanting news bites, looking for all kinds of assistance, etc. People offered everything from front-end loaders, to water purifiers, to places to stay, to physical labor.
We did our best to keep track and forward the information to where it would be useful. For several hours there were just two of us working at the chapter house. I kept one ear on the radio, since others had Net Control covered at the shelter at Rocky Mountain High School, and spent the rest of my time on the phone.
We tried to round up volunteers to staff the emergency shelter that opened at RMHS (around 2 am, I think, but I'm not sure), where at least 100 now homeless people eventually checked in. We woke up a lot of Red Cross volunteers. When News 4 announced our phone number on a live telecast just before 6 am the lines went crazy from then on and it was hard to get an outgoing line. As soon as you pressed the button you'd find yourself talking to an incoming caller!
I finally left at about 1:30 pm to go to work for a while for a meeting. Later that afternoon I checked in by ham radio and discovered I wasn't needed, so instead my daughter and I went back to my friend's house to help her clean up. We ran three wet vacs for several hours to try to save the basement carpet. We dumped at least 100 gallons of water down the drain -- which fortunately was working.
Meanwhile some of her other friends sandbagged the house in case it poured again that evening. Fortunately all the bad weather was east of us and the town just got a little more rain.
My daughter and I dropped by the Red Cross shelter on the way home to see how it was going. The sheer volume of food and goods that had arrived there was staggering. The outpouring of aid and support blew my mind. It was already past 9 pm and they had copious fresh food going to waste, so we ate dinner there and finally went home. I crashed at about 10:30 pm after being up 38 hours. I felt fine but my mind was going; I couldn't even pronounce words like "shelter manager". :-)
(Next trip report: 1998_0311_SkySights.htm)