Chapter 138
The Deluge

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(Originally posted January 30, 2014)

September 11-14, 2013

Wednesday seemed like a pretty ordinary day when we woke up. A little overcast—which admittedly is bizarre for CO where the sun usually shines brightly—but nothing too foreboding. Tracy went to work and I went to my mom’s to work, and while we were there it started raining. At one point, it rained so hard briefly that my mom jokingly said “maybe this will be the 100-year flood,” but then it quickly let up again. After I went back to Tracy’s parents’ house, we were waiting for Tracy to come back from a career fair that she was working at, and the clouds suddenly opened up. Tracy got stuck in crazy traffic on the way home because of the weather, and she stopped quickly to get some dinner at Noodles and Company.

When she went into the restaurant, the parking lot was a little wet, but when she came out ten minutes later, there were already about six inches of water rushing and her feet got soaked. The drive home was a bit treacherous, but she arrived safely and we went about our night like usual. At one point around 10pm, we noticed that the rain was really coming down in sheets, and we all went to bed feeling a little uneasy.

The next morning, Tracy and I awoke to the sound of buckets scraping against the downstairs shower floor. Water was coming up through the drains in the bathroom and the laundry room, and her parents were locked into a constant routine of trying to bail out the water before it overflowed from the shower or reached the important appliances like the furnace. They were doing the best they could with limited materials, but what we really needed was some sort of shop-vac or pump that would allow us to get rid of the water more than one gallon at a time. We called around to all the Home Depots in the area, and of course, most were sold out. We happened to reserve the display model at a store in Longmont, though, so Tracy and I set out on the 30-minute drive to pick it up (Tracy had called out from work today, as had most of the company).

We didn’t really encounter any awful flooding on our drive, though the runoff ditch alongside one of the major roads had turned into a gushing river.

Luckily, we had no problems getting the shop-vac, and we returned back to the house in the nick of time to start putting it to work. Having the vacuum made the whole process of collecting water much easier because it would only fill up once every five minutes or so. Then we would empty the giant tub into individual buckets and take turns hauling them outside to dump them into the street. I was responsible for most of the hauling while Tracy controlled the vacuum. I must have taken at least 100 bucketfuls to the driveway during a very long afternoon.

About halfway through the day, one of Tracy’s aunts showed up. She lives in Denver, where the flooding wasn’t too bad, and she’d managed to find a store with a sump pump still in stock. Once we installed the pump into our complicated system, I didn’t have to haul buckets anymore (thank goodness!!!), and we really thought we had the situation pretty well under control.

The water was obviously coming up from the sewers, so we weren’t really able to use the showers or toilets in Tracy’s parents’ house. It was clear that we needed to get a hotel room for at least tonight, and there was luckily a hotel right down the street with open rooms. Tracy and I felt like we were in heaven as we checked in and were able to flush the toilet and wash our hands, but we were needed back at the homestead, so we headed back over to the house pretty quickly. The rain was still coming down in steady sheets—I’ve truly never witnessed anything like it.

Dinnertime rolled around, and we couldn’t really prepare anything in the house, so Tracy and I went out to get a pizza. There weren’t really any warnings about staying off the roads currently in place, and we were SO anxious to get out of the house after being stuck in the laundry room all day. The sights we saw as we started driving, though, were pretty crazy. It felt like we were driving through rivers in some places, and we quickly had to abandon the idea of going to the pizza place we’d planned on hitting because we didn’t think the roads would be passable.

Changing directions, we went to a different part of town and picked up a pizza. We had just paid when we got a call from Tracy’s parents. The water had started coming in through the foundation. There was going to be no way to stop the flooding now, so our new mission was to try to get as much as we could out of the house and into the garage as possible.

We immediately set to work when we got back, and we truly salvaged almost everything out of the house before it was ruined. We realized, however, that pretty much anything that touched water had to be thrown out (because this really wasn’t WATER, per say—it was sewage and fertilizers and chemicals).

I don’t think that I have ever been as exhausted as I was this evening having spent the entire day trying to keep the water out and then being beaten by it anyway. It’s amazing how much STUFF is piled in a house to try to get out.

Now, I should note that we were VERY lucky. Tracy’s parents live in a garden level home (so the basement is only about six feet underground). Most of the other houses on the block had true basements, and they were dealing with MUCH worse than we were—but more on that later.

The carpet was obviously breached as we finished hauling everything to the garage.

Our room looked basically unrecognizable.

Obviously, we were VERY glad we had gotten our hotel room booked because now all the hotels in the area were filling up.

As we got everything out, Tracy and I finally headed back to the hotel. Her dad set up the pump in one of the rooms that had the most water gathering in it and left it on overnight with the hope that it would keep the water level from getting too high. By now, they had officially categorized this as the 100-Year Flood my mom had joked about, but it still wasn’t over yet.

I have never been so happy to take a shower as I was that night at the hotel. Our socks and shoes and pant legs were all soaked through with disgusting water, and we felt like we would never be clean again, but on the upside, we were sound asleep the moment our heads hit the pillows.

The next morning, we awoke and opened the curtains in the hotel to see a truly beautiful sight—blue sky.

While the blue didn’t last, the rain seemed to be lighter today, and Tracy’s parents arrived at our hotel bearing good news. The pump had been going all night, and it had managed to get out almost all the water from the basement. At its highest point, it had only reached about four inches, which meant that we’d been some of the least-affected people on the block.

After breakfast, we returned to the house as the news from the neighbors was starting to roll in. Next door, our neighbor Kim had about five feet of water in her basement and a giant crack in her foundation that was causing water to keep rushing in. The neighbors on the other side had gotten enough water in their basement that it reached the ceiling (10 feet in total, I think). They had just spent about $50,000 finishing the basement so that several of their kids could live down there, and it looked like they would need to basically start again from square one.

Down the street, at our friend Lainey’s mom’s house, the water had been pretty awful since Thursday morning. Here’s a picture they sent us while we were still just trying to keep the sewer backup out.

As morning turned into afternoon, the rain stopped (possibly for good?), and the sun came out in Boulder.

Tracy and I took Stupey Doodle for a walk because she had literally been stuck inside for the last three days, and we were able to survey some of the worst damage across the street.

This is the parking lot at a retirement home, where the water had shifted several of the cars.

The glassy surface in this next picture is actually a reflection. Under this building was a parking garage for the retirement home, and that’s the water level, which filled up the entire structure up to ground level.

Here was one of the many manholes that were still overflowing—proof that the water wasn’t going anywhere any time soon because it literally had nowhere to go.

That afternoon, we got a call from Home Depot. They had a shipment of 10,000 sump pumps coming up from Texas, and we were welcome to come to the store if we wanted to try to get one (or more) from the load. Tracy and I volunteered to pick up the pumps while her parents continued with water abatement (while nothing else was coming in through the foundation, it was still flowing up from the sewers in force).

The sump pump line at Home Depot looked vaguely reminiscent of an E-ticket at Disneyland.

It wrapped all the way around the store, but Tracy and I got spots and eventually made it to the front.

That evening, we went over to Lainey’s apartment and heard some of the most horrific stories yet. They lived on the second floor, but the first floor of apartments were all basically at garden level like our basement. Apparently at around 6:00pm Thursday night, a dam had broken nearby their apartment and the water came rushing toward their complex like a river. It entirely flooded the outside walkway on the first floor of their building, so people in those apartments were stuck inside. Lainey’s fiancé Reed and several of the other guys from the complex had to go around kicking out doors and windows so that people on the first level could escape. Then everyone had to join hands and wade across the river that used to be a street (including Lainey carrying her 8-month old baby) so they could get to higher ground.

We also heard about Lainey’s mom’s boyfriend who happened to be driving when the dam broke. Suddenly, the street that had been easily passable moments earlier had six feet of water. It came up over the hood of his car, which started floating, and he had to climb out the window and push the car to the other side of this sudden lake.

Not to mention, the entire city of Longomont (where Tracy and I had gone to Home Depot just about 36 hours earlier) had turned into a series of islands as the St. Vrain River totally washed out streets and made the city inaccessible by cars for a few days.

Similar (and in some cases, worse) amounts of flooding had happened in the mountain towns like Estes and Nederland, and the roads that went up there were completely destroyed in many areas. We still haven’t been able to go up to Estes since then, so we have no idea what the damage to the town looks like or even if our slow-vehicle pulloff and special rock are still intact.

By now, luckily, it looked like the worst was over, but there were still hundreds of people missing—mostly because they lived in hard to reach places. In the next few days, almost everyone was found again, but the flood did claim several lives around Boulder.

Tracy and I had picked up the supplies to start ripping out the downstairs carpet while we were at Home Depot because we had read that you need to start doing that immediately before mold can start to form. We literally began cutting out the first square of waterlogged carpet when Tracy cut her finger on one of the carpet tacks. We had no idea when her last tetanus shot was, so we had to abandon the plan and drive her to the nearest pharmacy to get one.

While we were gone, we saw that the neighbors had gotten a carpet company to come in and rip out theirs downstairs, and Tracy’s mom was able to wrangle them to do ours as well. Within an hour, these two guys did a job that would have easily taken us five times that long. They even set up some industrial-strength fans and told us that the basement would be dry within a couple days. Almost no one else was having as much luck as we were. Instead, most of them had basements still overflowing with water, and they were needing to knock down all their basement walls so that mold couldn’t build in them either. The estimated average amount of damage done to people’s homes ranged from $20,000 to $50,000.

Everything started looking up for us from that point on, and our worst experiences with the flood were behind us. It had officially been categorized as a 1000-year flood at this point (which means that the chances of this much rain falling in any given year are 1 in 1000). Our experiences and pictures seem like nothing when you take a look at some of the things other people in Boulder had to deal with. Here and here are some links that show some of the most awe-inspiring damage.

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