Seven months after the Crazy Colorado Floods

September of 2013 Colorado received a very, very, abnormally heavy amount of rain that results in flooding in over a dozen counties. The Governor declared it a natural disaster, President Obama declared it a state of emergency in which case search & rescue team come out & there was federal assistance made available to certain counties & for food, water, cots & generators. I believe over a billion dollars of damage was done, which includes damage done to home, land, farms & crops, as well as having oil & gas wells shut down for a while. So basically it was a huge natural disaster for some counties!

I heard of roads being swept away & saw videos of water running through farm lands & homes flooding but I never saw first hand any of the damage. That changed this last weekend. A friend and I went snow shoeing at Brainard lake and we drove through Boulder county to get there. Boulder county was one of the counties hit the hardest by the flooding. I was almost dumb struck by what I saw. I still struggle to put words to all the carnage that is left of the land & roads out there.

What amazes me more than anything was seeing roads that had been washed out. The road we drove on had been washed out in over a dozen areas. Anywhere from a stretch of eighteen feet to about two hundred feet sections of road had been washed away. This road was not a dirt road, it was paved. There were entire sections of concrete road & everything below it that washed away in the flood. I cannot imagine how much water & how fast it would have to be moving to rip up & destroy a paved road! Not only the road but all the land around it as well.

The road we were in was in a small valley with trees that had branches stripped off them & many broken branches. I was told that was an indicator of how high the water was flowing through that valley. In some sections it looked to be ten to fifteen feet from the ground where the branches were broken & stripped off the tree. I saw homes near the road that had drive ways & property demolished. Some homes had a driveway which connected the home to the main road & that driveway had been swept out. I saw areas of land where it looked like the earth had just opened. I could not see the bottom of those openings from our car as we drove by so these holes in the ground are deep as well.

It is mind blowing how much damage was done to these counties. If anyone out there feels inclined to donate to emergency disaster relief agencies or donate time to helping home owners & counties in that area I encourage you to get involved. I know I am going to try to find some way to donate my time or money to helping.