BOULDER COUNTY LEARNED LESSONS FROM DEVASTATING FLOOD
What started as a light drizzle in the afternoon of Sept. 9, 2013, turned into one of the most costly and devastating floods in Colorado history.
Ten years later, recovery is largely completed, but the flood left an imprint on Boulder County infrastructure and taught valuable lessons on recovering from and preparing for future disasters.
The 2013 flood was an eightday event considered a 1,000-year rain and 100-year flood, which means there is a 0.1% chance of receiving that much rain and a 1% chance of a flood of that magnitude in any given year. It destroyed 345 homes, damaged 557 others, killed four people and evacuated more than 1,800 countywide.
Some recovery projects, including construction of affordable townhomes in Lyons and Resilient St. Vrain in Longmont, are ongoing. Infrastructure repairs were the most costly area of flood recovery, and work on most of those projects has concluded, including repair of roads and bridges.
Michelle Stinnett, recovery and resiliency division manager for Boulder County, said, “It’s hard to pin down” how much total money funded all infrastructure repairs in the county.
This is because some projects were funded by sources outside the county. For example, watershed projects were funded by the federal Emergency Watershed Protection Program, and state roads that run through the county are controlled by the Colorado Department of Transportation. Individual municipalities also had the power to apply for funding that’s not administered by the county, as well as homeowners who sought individual assistance.
However, the amount of money Boulder County spent on county-controlled infrastructure was more than $127 million on 47 different flood recovery infrastructure projects. The most costly project, at nearly $50 million, was reconstructing Gold Run Road, Wagon Wheel Gap Road, Lower and Upper Fourmile Canyon Drive and Salina Junction. That project is now under review by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for reimbursement.
Another large infrastructure project for the county included expanding the Old South St. Vrain bridge to 180 feet compared to its original 73 feet. Stinnett said the bridge now adheres to a 100-year flood design standard and allows for more efficient flow of water.
Another large project was repairing James Canyon Drive, which was washed out and eroded to the bedrock of the creek bottom, cutting off Jamestown from its neighboring communities. The new road was engineered with special rock structures and retaining walls for resiliency against future natural disasters.
According to the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, the consolidation of park repairs in Lyons, which cost nearly $25 million, and the Resilient St. Vrain project were also among the biggest infrastructure projects in the county. The estimated total cost of the Resilient St. Vrain project, which is not funded by Boulder County, is $140 million, and Longmont has completed $80 million in improvements to date.
FEMA also provided more than $186 million in funding for infrastructure projects in Boulder County. The largest County projects FEMA contributed to, according to FEMA Region 8 Administrator Nancy Dragani, were the repair of James Canyon Drive, Longmont Dam Road and Gold Run Road, which were washed out.
FEMA also contributed more than $35 million in individual
assistance and $9.3 million in hazard mitigation funding.
Kevin Klein is the director of the Colorado DHSEM, which manages FEMA funds and coordinates with the small business administration and Department of Local Affairs to help manage infrastructure and community block grant disaster relief.
Klein estimates approximately $1.8 billion in relief money came in for the 2013 flood recovery and response statewide. Major areas of funding include housing, infrastructure, watershed restoration and economic recovery.
Heather Paddock, the Region 4 transportation director for CDOT, said there were 200 bridges damaged and 486 miles of state roads closed due to the floods statewide. After nine years of construction, CDOT finished its final flood road repair in 2022, which was Colo. 7 lower from Lyons to Allenspark that November.
“Surprisingly enough, although a decade seems like a lot, it was a $750 million program,” Paddock said. “And of a disaster of this size, Colorado has responded faster than any other state as far as recovery and closing out all of the projects within a decade.”
Focus on resiliency, preparation
To build back roads for resiliency, CDOT brought in experts to engineer creative solutions. Paddock said they saw that in the flood, roads that were not built on bedrock washed away. So, CDOT moved rocks to areas where there weren’t rocks before and built roads on top of it to prevent the road from being washed away in the future. CDOT also blasted parts of mountains to move roads away from rivers and designed roadways in the canyons so there’s a 15-foot wide traversable passing lane.
For example, U.S. 36 from Lyons to Estes was CDOT’S first major repair project. CDOT blasted into the mountains so they could move one or two lanes and build the road on rocks so it wouldn’t wash away.
The design of bridges also improved. During the flood, many bridges were so solid they acted like dams and collected massive amounts of debris, causing water to build up. When they broke, the bridges amplified the flood event to a 500-year flood and caused additional damage, Paddock said. Now, some bridges are designed so when they do break in a major flood event, there’s less damage.
There were also areas where there was no practical way to engineer a solution to improve the road, Paddock said, including Colo. 7, CDOT’S final flood recovery project. So, CDOT knows there will be road loss there in the future and stockpiles materials nearby to be prepared to construct a temporary road.
“If we see the same event over the same watersheds that we saw in 2013, absolutely (we are prepared),” Paddock said. “The funny thing about Mother Nature is I don’t think she always strikes at the same time at the same location in the same way.”
There were 110 miles of Boulder County roads that needed to be completely rebuilt and 15 bridges that were replaced or added, Boulder County Public Works Communications Manager Andrew Barth said. Ten of the bridges were existing and four new bridges replaced culverts, which are tunnels that carry water under a road. Bridges allow a lot more water to flow underneath a road than a culvert, Barth said.
There was one new bridge built on Flagstaff Road in a problematic hill slide area. The bridge is built a few feet off the ground to allow the hillside to slide under the road instead of washing the road away with it. The final county road repair project wrapped up in 2020 with the rebuilding of Sugar Loaf Road.
“What’s been amazing is we’ve been able to see the rains that have come, nothing like 2013, but we’ve been watching all these roads over the course of time, and they’ve held up well,” Barth said. “So we’re very happy with what’s happening and we continue to monitor to make sure our solutions stay in place.”
Scale of damage surprised
One of the major lessons from the disaster was about the sheer amount of flooding that can happen in Boulder County and the areas it can affect. Canyons, burn scar areas and single drainageways have been known to flood, but in 2013, every drainageway in the county became flooded, including all 16 drainageways in Boulder.
When multiple drainageways flooded, “It kind of changed the size and scale of how flooding can occur in our county,” said Mike Chard, director of the Boulder Office of Disaster Management, which oversees disaster response and recovery countywide. “I don’t think there were a lot of people thinking that could happen.”
The flood also hit areas that were not previously thought to be vulnerable. Floodplain mapping can identify areas that are at higher risk of flooding, but there was flooding even in areas far outside the floodplain, according to Stinnett, the Boulder County recovery and resiliency manager.
“Most residents didn’t quite understand their risk. Obviously, if you are living right next to a stream … then you have a little bit better of an understanding of what your risk is,” Stinnett said. “But this showed the community writ large that flooding can happen anywhere.”
Paddock said CDOT collected a lot of valuable information from stream gauges for hydrology studies in partnership with the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Additionally, following the flood, FEMA remapped the floodplains and added recommendations for more homes to have flood insurance that didn’t previously.
“This flood, although it was disastrous, also provides opportunities for a lot of re-mapping and it’s more data points in the system that makes our models that much stronger,” Paddock said.
‘Neighbors helping neighbors’
The massive scale of the flood also meant jurisdictions across Boulder County needed to work together on response and recovery. Boulder County partnered with Boulder, Jamestown, Lafayette, Longmont, Louisville, Lyons, Nederland, and the St. Vrain and Lefthand Water Conservancy Districts to form the Boulder County Collaborative, which helped administer emergency and grant funding to parts of the county that could not have administered the funds themselves.
“Especially the smaller (jurisdictions) — when you think (of) Lyons, Jamestown, they were very hard hit and did not have adequate staff to run for federal programs on their own without substantial amounts of technical assistance from the state,” Stinnett said.
After the Fourmile Canyon Fire of 2010, Stinnett said, the county had already recognized the need for a centralized recovery function, but the flood also gave the impetus for the county to shift from local to crossjurisdictional planning. The county transitioned away from local flood master plans and toward broader planning for whole watersheds that takes all affected jurisdictions into account.
Chard said since the time of the flood, the county has invested in incident command training as well as interagency training and cooperation. There is a multiagency coordination group made up of city and county departments that now each have a specific role to play in a disaster. The county also now has a severe weather protocol, rain gauges and enhanced weather radar forecasting to better evaluate developing storms.
Understanding the devastating scope of what was possible also brought a heightened awareness of flooding among community members and a sense of urgency about being more prepared the next time a flood strikes. To that end, the county has sought to educate residents about their flood risk and provide preparedness classes and workshops for community members as well as government employees.
But one of the biggest lessons of all from the flood was about the importance of community members helping and supporting one another during and after the disaster.
“(Recovery) starts at the community level and it ends at the community level,” said Joycelyn Fankhouser, a flood recovery coordinator for the county. “Neighbors helping neighbors is the first thing that happens because neighbors can help each other faster than any first responder can get to you. And then, after all the federal programs come and go, it still comes back to your community helping you.”
The flood also sparked creative new ways for community members to communicate with each other and with emergency personnel. Floodwaters split Lyons, where Fankhouser lives, into six isolated “islands” that were cut off from one another. Now, residents in Lyons have a system where they use radios to communicate, and each of the areas that became isolated during the flood now has a neighborhood captain who can reach the fire department and first responders by radio.
Support within communities was essential because the flood had such wideranging impacts throughout Boulder County and beyond.
“Everyone was affected,” Chard said. “There was not a community at all, during those four-and-a-half days of rain, that was not feeling a devastating impact.”