Residents in canyons, Jamestown see lasting changes to homes
Residents in Jamestown and throughout the canyons in Boulder County are fully recovered from the 2013 flood, but some aspects of their homes and communities will forever remain changed.
Jamestown Assistant Flood Recovery Manager Erika Archer said the town has reached the same approximate population it had before the flood, about 300. While 10% of its residents didn’t return after the flood, the majority did, and the town has since welcomed new people to the community.
“People have come back, and it’s really wonderful,” Archer said. “It feels like a vibrant community again, and it feels really heartwarming to see that resiliency.”
Jamestown was one of the communities hit hardest during the flood. About 90% of the community was evacuated by helicopter due to the collapse of James Canyon Drive on both sides of the town, isolating it from neighboring communities.
There were 17 houses, or 13% of the town’s homes, that were destroyed, and 45 homes had severe damage. Additionally, residents were displaced for about nine months, with or without home damage, because the water treatment system was destroyed, as was the fire station.
The community also lost resident Joey Howlett, 72, who died when a mudslide struck his home. The town has since created a memorial where his house used to stand.
Flood recovery in Jamestown took multiple years, with a few final, smaller projects wrapping up in 2017. Now, Mayor Michael Box said, the community is just now starting to look back.
Box said he notices visible differences in the town that weren’t there 10 years ago. Before the flood, he said, the people and the land were strongly “integrated” in the way the homes were built, the creek flowed and with paths hidden along the creek bed that the flood destroyed.
While there’s a lot of great new infrastructure such as roads, bridges, the water system and creek bed, Box said, the town doesn’t have the same feel to it. He said it’s lost some of its “funkiness” left over from the ’50s and ’60s, and the “old mining town feel has been altered in a lot of ways.”
Tara Schoedinger, mayor of Jamestown during the flood, said the town has always been a small but special community of about 250 people ranging from musicians and artists to professionals and academics.
“It’s always been a closeknit community, and so I wasn’t surprised by it, but I felt an immense amount of gratitude to the community in the way they came together to support each other during some of the hardest times,” Schoedinger said.
Box said he’s also seen property values rise since the flood, making Jamestown a place where not everyone can live anymore. Without affordable rent or home values, Box said, it’s excluding certain people from living there.
“As prices rise, it’s just going to cut out more and more people,” Box said. “It’s going to cut out bigger chunks of the population that might move there, so maybe we have less artists, maybe we have less creative young people moving into town. It limits the demographic of people who can afford to live here.”
Despite the changes, Box said he’s grateful for the new infrastructure and the community of people in Jamestown.
“The town is a really wonderful place, and I constantly feel how lucky I am to get to live there, and a lot of other folks do too,” he said. “It’s a really beautiful place.”
The flood recovery effort was run almost exclusively by volunteers, Box said, and the town itself is unique in that its government is nearly all volunteers.
More than 4,300 volunteers helped rebuild Jamestown after the floods, Archer said. She said Mennonite Disaster Service essentially lived in Jamestown for two years and brought in groups every week, totaling 20,400 hours of service. Habitat for Humanity donated more than 10,000 volunteer hours, and Archer estimates the total volunteer hours to be worth $1.6 million.
Boulder County Public Works Communication Manager Andrew Barth said every canyon in Boulder County was impacted by the floods, with most of the canyon roads destroyed.
Instead of completely closing the roads they worked on, Barth said, canyon residents typically could be escorted out of their homes or come and go during a one- or two-hour window twice a day.
Barth said residents in Fourmile Canyon were heavily impacted because of its more dense population and three years of construction time with daily delays.
Fourmile Canyon resident Robert Beebe counted himself lucky when he returned to his home after the flood and found his house intact with only a small amount of flooding in the basement. The road above and below his house and the parking area outside his home were destroyed.
Beebe said he’s thankful the county didn’t completely close the roads for repair, instead allowing residents to come in and out at certain times. Although flood recovery for him and his neighbors is complete, there’s no longer a single tree in Beebe’s backyard, where a beautiful aspen grove was located prior to the flood, despite his best efforts to replant. On the flip side, he said, his community of about a half-dozen homes along the canyon really came together during and after the flood.
“Before the flood, I don’t think people knew their neighbors at all,” Beebe said. “After the flood, we can together a community, and from that standpoint, it’s been a good thing.”