10 thoughts on “AFP News Monday Colorado Flooding Update”

1. South Boulder is a mess. Not as bad as Lyons or Jamestown, but it is bad.

   • About every 10th house (including ours) has a giant pile of stuff in front of it. Carpets, drywall, wet storage boxes, etc.
   • Broadway near Table Mesa has had sewage pushing out of manhole covers. Seems to be fixed now, but was doing it through yesterday evening.
   • Lots of houses (fortunately not ours) had sewage flowing in through the drains in the house.
   • One bridge over Bear Creek is seriously damaged. The bridge connects the uphill and downhill portions of Table Mesa Dr.
   • The washed out bank on one side of Bear Creek exposed about 40' of a 6" pipe. Pretty sure it's for electricity as there's 5 Xcel trucks there working on it.
   • Everyone's sump pumps are working pretty much non-stop. It looks like the water table is presently above the floor in everyone's basement.

   For our house, we got 6" of water in the basement. Got it removed the next day and the one broken sump pump (lovely time for it to die) replaced. Rained a ton again that night and we were back to 1" of water, but everything held and by morning we were back down to no standing water.

   On Saturday we got all the damaged parts removed, including the bottom 2' of drywall everywhere. And the water heaters replaced (used to have 2 50gal heaters, but now 1 as my 3 daughters have moved out which significantly reduces hot water usage).

   We did not lose anything important. We got all pictures, computers, etc. moved upstairs when it first started. When cleaning up, we threw out everything we no longer use – and that was a lot of stuff. Both the carpet & hot water heaters were well past when they should have been replaced. And the couch & chairs were truly falling apart (but very comfortable).

   It will still cost us 10 – 20K and that hurts. A lot (no flood insurance). But others got it a lot worse. And aside from removing the damaged stuff and replacing the drywall, everything else is something way past due. Procrastination paid off 🙂

   All the best to those who had damage. One person we know lost her entire house – it went sliding down the hill in Lyons. All the people are ok but they think they lost their cat.

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   1. Really sorry for your losses, David.  Admire you're positive attitude but don't be afraid to give yourself permission to feel your losses. Yes, others have it worse but it's no picnic for you either. 

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   2. David, if it's any consolation (just so you stop kicking yourself) flood insurance doesn't cover flooded basements when the water comes in through the ground or up from the drain. It has to be above-ground water pouring in to be covered. In this case, almost everybody in Table Mesa isn't covered. 

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      1. Yep.  Insurance companies are really good at coming up with so many loopholes for themselves, the insured is often left holding the bag despite paying for years believing that losses will be covered.  Flood damage is one of those areas with almost limitless ifs ands or buts. And it's also very expensive. 

         I remember when a friend was robbed in his jewelry store at gun point, suffering ruinous losses, and his insurance company tied to get out of it by claiming he was only covered for break in and this guy had walked in. He did get a settlement after a lengthy law suit so stressful it probably contributed to the heart attack he suffered during the process when he was still in his thirties.

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2. The increasingly out of control sewage situation is also very concerning.  In Evans and surrounding areas in Weld county there is already a no flush order, no laundry, no showers, no washing dishes. The city is planning to distribute porto-potties but it's hard to imagine a sufficient supply of those is available so in the meantime and even after it will have to be do it yourself solutions to waste disposal. In Boulder residents are being asked to keep water use including flushing to a minimim. A broken sewer line was spilling on campus, fortunately in a pretty out of the way area that is being blocked off. David can probably tell us more about the Boulder situation. 

   Who knows how much worse this situation will get, how many more areas will be affected by this particular health hazard, how long it will go on?  Poor or entirely lacking sanitation options are extremely dangerous in terms of spreading the kinds of diseases we're used to reading about in third world countries. Extreme vigilance may be necessary to prevent an infectious disease disaster in the wake of these devastating floods.

   This well and truly sucks. And, once again, there's no way big disasters like this can begin to be addressed without a matching sufficiently big, vigorous, well funded government to respond. Neighbors helping neighbors is a wonderful inspiring thing but can only accomplish so much without an effective government in partnership.  The achievement of bathtub drowning size would see mutiple disasters like those this vast nation has suffered from one coast to the other in such quick succession, massive fires, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes, destroying the fabric of society beyond repair.  Any Tea Party type who claims otherwise is an ignorant fool.

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   1. Wow. This time I did no copying and pasting. Just read through to find errors myself.  This hasn't happened before when I don't copy to edit. Sorry for taking up so much extra space. 

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      1. Try this–just before you post, click the "Source" button and scan through the code for any instances of this style tag: line-height: 1.6em. If you see that, remove it. You don't have to remove the rest of the HTML around it, just that exact bit, and your comments will be formatted correctly.

         Another option is to highlight all your text, and click the little blue eraser button on the bottom row–"remove formatting." This does strip out most browser-introduced problems in text like this.

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         1. Thanks. I'll try that.

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3. "time to pull out my wallet"?

   I thought that was April 15, or quarterly some years.

   I get the point- but here's a related one.  The infrastructure that failed and is failing, the first repsonders and other S & R and all the airborne assets are publicly funded. I already paid my share for them.

   Now if you said it was time to pull out my wallet because it's time to invest more in infrastructure and public safety, I agree.

   Let's start with big oil (and gas) paying their own way to clean up the damage and mess they caused.  I'll be right behind them.

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   1. Good points. Not to discourage charity, since the anti-tax mania together with the entire edifice of discredited conservative economic policy has reduced us to a nation where 99% have to make due splitting up the big fat 5% of economic gains from the recovery that is all that didn't get gobbled up by the top 1%,  but because Americans shouldn't have to depend on charity. The wealthiest nation on the planet ought to be able address emergencies without our citizens being reduced to begging for charity that may or may not be forthcoming. 

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