DENVER (AP) – A large rectangle of dirt is all that is left of Doug Miller’s life from the days before the rains fell two years ago.
“That will be home one day again,” the 50-year-old custom-home builder said, standing in front of the empty footprint that served as the foundation for his home of nine years. “That’s never swayed.”
But exactly when his property, on a quiet block of Park Street near the confluence of the north and south forks of the St. Vrain River in Lyons, will be restored to a livable state is vexingly elusive.
“Sometimes I’m hopeful that things are going to start moving,” Miller said last week, as his dog Juneau wandered among piles of soggy-looking asphalt that used to be the road. “And other times I get really frustrated.”
As Colorado hits the two-year mark since a historic deluge swelled rivers and creeks to overflowing, killing 10 people and causing nearly $4 billion in damage across 24 counties, frustration is a theme for a surprisingly large group of people still dealing with the storm’s aftermath.
Hundreds of mobile home park residents in Evans, a city of 20,000 south of Greeley, are unable to return to communities that have been effectively scraped off the map.
The major access road into Glen Haven is still being put back together, causing repeated daily hourlong delays that result in unending headaches for locals and drive away tourist traffic headed to or from nearby Estes Park.
Only three of 17 homes in Jamestown destroyed by a manic James Creek have been completely rebuilt, and a part of the population has moved or hasn’t yet moved back to the tiny mountain town.
And then there are the dozens of Lyons residents, locked in a seemingly endless bureaucratic arm-wrestling match with town officials over attempts to get permits to rebuild their homes.
$4 billion marathon
Molly Urbina, the state’s chief recovery officer, acknowledged that despite the billions spent to make repairs and provide compensation to victims of Colorado’s most costly natural disaster, problems remain.
The state, she said, has not forgotten about those still suffering.
“When we talk about disasters, we talk about a marathon, not a sprint,” Urbina said. “We continue to coordinate with local communities to assess and evaluate needs and priorities and to advocate for additional resources.”
Urbina said estimating costs for a disaster the size of the 2013 floods, which destroyed 1,852 homes and 203 businesses and created more than 18,000 evacuees over a five-day period starting Sept. 10, 2013, is a “complex, long-term process.”
“We understood that this would evolve as recovery priorities and projects became more clear,” she said.
The dynamic nature of the floods’ impact has played out in dramatic fashion since the one-year anniversary, with the cost of rebuilding in Colorado swelling by a third to nearly $4 billion.
The $1 billion spike, Urbina said, reflects the fact that initial cost estimates done in the months following the flood were rough. In the past year, more detailed estimates of what it would cost to fully repair and restore roads and watersheds in the state were made.
Finding the new norm
Rose Womack and her 79-year-old mother, both on fixed incomes, needed at least $30,000 in repairs to their Longmont home but got only about $9,000 in government relief money. Fortunately, they got help from volunteers and others that transcended mere dollar amounts.
Skilled laborers with the United Church of Christ Disaster Ministries and the Rocky Mountain Conference of The United Methodist Church tore out all the flood-damaged walls and replaced them at no cost. Lumber Liquidators called up one day and asked where it could deliver the new floors.
Womack chokes up a little when she talks about the buses of high school-aged children that descended on the neighborhood to haul away debris and re-establish the landscaping.
“They say there are angels among us,” she said.
Unsettled future
A new normal is being pieced together in Evans, where the Eastwood Village and Bella Vista mobile home parks were turned from once-vibrant low-income neighborhoods to empty, weed-choked lots by the floods. It’s not certain what will happen to the two properties, though Bella Vista’s owner is working with the city to re-establish itself at the same spot on 37th Street.
Nearby, the bulk of Riverfront Park, including a group of ballfields that haven’t seen action since summer 2013, remains fenced off to the public – too damaged to reopen. The raging waters of the South Platte River tore up the surface of the park, unveiling an old landfill the city didn’t even know was there.
“The flood is the defining event of the city,” said Evans’ flood recovery manager, Zach Ratkai. “And the repair of flood-affected areas in Evans is a daunting task.”
While roads have largely been overhauled and $16 million has been set aside for fixes to Riverfront Park, Ratkai said flood-related repairs in Evans will be a fact of life for the next two to three years.
But the city just south of Greeley doesn’t have the money to front for repairs, Ratkai said, instead having to rely on reimbursement from federal and state agencies.
“Evans is large enough to be on the map as a disaster-affected area, but we’re small enough not to have a lot of extra money in our coffers,” he said.
