‹ chat status"The water came roaring down and kept moving back and forth; cars and trailers looked like toys in a bathtub."
On the night of July 31 in 1976, three storm systems collided over the upper Big Thompson Canyon, dropping 12 inches of rain on Glen Comfort and Glen Haven at rates reaching 5 inches per hour. The flooding started around 8:30 pm.
A series of small dams, created by debris washing downstream by the surging river, started holding back large amounts of water.
When the dams finally broke between 7:30 and 8 p.m., a wall of water swept toward the mouth of the canyon almost 20 miles away.
In its wake, the Big Thompson flood injured 250 people, killed 144, and washed away millions of dollars of property."
I was looking through my books about the 1976 Big Thompson flood today while it was raining, and came across an interview with the woman who lived in what is now our small red guest cabin.
In 1976 that property was Castle Rock Campground and the owner/operator lived in the small log cabin that she said was built in the 1800s, and she claimed she had lived in the canyon 50 years at the time of the flood.
She said that fortunately she had only five campers that night and they were in a Winnebago eating dinner when it began to shake. Upon opening the door they stepped out into water up to their chests and she (the campground owner) "got them started up the path" toward high ground on the hill behind her cabin and the adjacent highway.
Last year a woman from Oklahoma who was staying with her husband and two small children in a pickup camper at the campground called me and said the water was rising, about knee deep when they figured out there was a flood and she drove the truck up our driveway to the highway which was high ground. I don't know if this was what the campground lady referred to as a Winnebago, but maybe not.
So anyway, Mrs. Robbins, the campground owner, said she started them up the path and went around to shut her front door. But before she could get back around to the path she found herself in water up to her head. "I grabbed onto a TV aerial that was stuck in the ground and the buoyancy of the water lifted me onto the roof of my house." She remained there roughly four hours holding on as water smashed against the house. The only illumination was the horizontal lighting that was almost continuous. Water was pouring off the mountain, which is directly behind her house.
The woman from Oklahoma says they tried to get Mrs. Robbins to leave her house and come with them but she refused, claiming that she didn't expect the flood to be very serious. I'm thinking that they drove out of there fairly early in the knee-deep water before their truck engine was flooded and maybe the Winnebago was abandoned and swept downstream, its occupants having scrambled up the path to high ground.
In this photo the grass showing in the kitchen window is the slope of the hill - it's right outside the kitchen window, so imagine 2 or 3 feet of water pouring through that window.
Eventually Mrs. Robbins was able to go up the mountain by following a telephone line and joined the others, a group of what she guessed to be about 50 persons including a Lieutenant from the county sheriff's department and a state patrolman - the one who helped out with the pickup camper.
"Fortunately, there was a school bus from one of the youth camps stranded on the highway as well as a completely stocked camper which provided food and shelter. [I'm thinking this well-stocked camper was the people from Oklahoma.]
'The young people [from the camp] were wonderful,' she added, noting they entertained themselves by playing cards and frisbee." This was the next day while the 50 or so people waited on the piece of highway to be helicoptered out. The sheriff and state patrol cars had working radios so the group was able to communicate with the outside world.
Three days later when Mrs. Robbins was interviewed the flood waters had receded and she said her house had four inches of sand and mud in it and the contents were strewn about. She estimated the water level reached 8 to 10 feet inside.
So where was my family in all of this? My parents were in the house I live in now, with an architect and his family because they were getting ready to remodel this place so they could retire here. They were eating dinner when it started raining. The lights went out so they lit candles; the roof started to leak so they set out a bucket. My mother got up to get dessert, looked out the window and the bridge across the river and several large pine trees had already been swept away by the rising flood waters. The small stream between their cabin and the Brown Palace cabin next door was 8 feet deep and washed out a huge gully, moving boulders the size of cars. It was this stream which flooded the Brown and a third cabin that later burned down. My parents cabin was high enough to make it unscathed, but the river bank was cut away within feet of the corner of the front porch.
The noise was deafening: thunder, hissing propane tanks, trees, cars, parts of houses tumbling through the water and the sound of the big boulders being tumbled. And people who died, 144 total, who took shelter in their cars or motels or houses that were in the flood zones.
Just now a big thunder/lightning storm is moving in. Sitting here reading first-hand accounts of the flood, with this sound and light show outside is like watching a scary movie on Halloween.
posted on Aug 10, 2008 10:13 PM ()
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