Newsmakers Sept. 5-18: A year later, a long road back from floods

One year after the historic 2013 floods ravaged Boulder County and much of Northern Colorado, residents and officials were touting local communities’ resolve, celebrating the repairs that had been made, and at the same time girding for the long recovery still ahead.

As the anniversary of the floods rolled around in September, the Colorado Office of Emergency Management estimated the damage toll to be $3 million. The number is one that keeps rising as flood-related issues continue to arise for property owners after a weeklong, thousand-year rainstorm swamped much of the Front Range.

Depending on the community, officials expect that full recovery could take two to 10 more years. But there are also those communities – like Estes Park and even Lyons, one of the hardest-hit – where officials were looking back with the belief that things could have turned out much worse for their towns.

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Lyons, a town with an annual budget of $1 million, saw $45 million in damage to public infrastructure and 20 percent of its 960 homes damaged or destroyed. And yet, in a town that relies heavily on tourism as a gateway to Estes Park, sales tax revenue through the first eight months of this year was even with the same period in 2013 before the floods hit, despite town officials’ initial projections of a 40-percent slide in tax revenues for 2014.

Estes Park, too, was seeing tax revenues rebound more quickly than expected.

One thing that really can’t be sped up, however, is reconstruction of the hundreds of miles of roads and thousands of homes that were damaged. Ten thousand homes were affected, with hundreds destroyed, in Boulder County alone. At one point during the flood, 645 lane miles of roads were closed in Weld County. About 118 miles of state and federal highways were damaged.

UPDATE

Colorado Department of Transportation officials have said highway repairs will take about three more years. While CDOT had all of its highways, including U.S. Highways 34 and 36 to Estes Park, opened within a couple of months of the flood with temporary fixes, permanent repairs to 36 didn’t finish until this fall. Permanent repairs to 34 and other area highways won’t even begin until 2015 or later.

There are also streams to be rerouted and riverbanks to be restored.

“We are sticking with the message that this last year we got through was a sprint,” Val Beck, communications director for the Colorado Recovery Office, said as the flood’s anniversary approached. “That’s the stuff that needed to be repaired as soon as possible. But we’re headed into the marathon of all of this. And it’s going to be a long haul.”