In southwest Colorado, residents are still digging out in some of the areas hardest hit by flooding over the past month. Meanwhile, state and local officials are assessing damage to roads, bridges, waterways, and homes.
A few miles north of Durango, in an area called Junction Creek, Shane Richmond of the La Plata County Assessors' office stopped to ask Allison Brown whether her house was flooded.
It wasn’t. But Brown’s front yard was gone, replaced by fields of rocks and boulders.
Until a few weeks ago, Junction Creek flowed a few hundred yards away from Brown's house. But on November 1, heavy rain rushed out of the La Plata mountains, dragging trees and heavy boulders with it and plugging up the creek bed.
“The debris got caught under the bridge,” Brown said, pointing to a concrete structure. “Then the water just found its own way through.”
The water came within 4 feet of Brown’s home. But it took out her family’s barn, and it carried their old van and tiny house downstream.
“We have a tractor somewhere between here and town. We haven’t found it yet,” she said.
They found their rafting cooler three and a half miles downstream at Needham Elementary School.
“It’s perfectly fine, we’re using it,” Brown said, laughing. “Which is great because we didn’t have any power, so at least we had a cooler.”
After flooding hit the Four Corners a week ago, county assessors have been going house by house, through hard-hit areas, looking at damage to private property, and entering assessment data into a system used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.
(We evaluate) these homes that look like they potentially have damage to see which category they fall into in FEMA’s chart,” Richmond said. “Whether it’s demolished, severe, or minor (damage).”
Downstream, the Junction Creek Mobile Home Park had been evacuated, but residents were allowed back in for a few hours to collect belongings.
Silas Hatch was covering a pile of firewood behind his place and packing his car. He didn’t know when he’d be able to return home.
“I’m hoping less than two weeks,” Hatch said. “FEMA needs to come and do their assessment before we’re going to get any kind of green light.”
Power and water were shut off here, and floodwater had pushed around propane tanks.
“I can see why they wouldn’t want people moving back in, lighting fires, causing an explosion with leaking gas,” he said.
But he was worried about his belongings and long-term damage from mold and frozen pipes.
“I’m not in their shoes, but I can totally understand their frustration,” said Joey Laventure of the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office. “If we can get them back in, we will, as soon as we can. But not until it’s safe.”
By the end of the day, yellow caution tape stretched across the entrances of the mobile home park.
“We have health concerns, so: sewage, electric, water,” Laventure said. There are a couple (of mobile home)units that are in the water, so obviously that’s a big concern too.
Elsewhere on Junction Creek, heavy equipment operators have been working for almost a week, clearing huge mounds of mud and earth from Marlo Buiso’s yard.
“I lost my well. I lost my septic system,” Buiso said.
Buiso and his wife Margaret have lived in the house for 35 years. On November 1, they were at home with their two sons, preparing for flooding
“It was all hands on deck,” Buiso said. “Making emergency decisions and acting on them as quickly as we could.”
Then the creek clogged the bridges in their neighborhood, and floodwaters forced them all inside.
“We were trapped for three days, water on all 3 sides of the house,” Margaret Buiso said. “A torrent of raging water. Boulders were hitting the house. Trees were hitting the house. We didn’t sleep for three nights.”
In the last few days, the Buisos paid $10,000 just to repair the well at their house.
“This is likely one of the largest disasters that La Plata County has ever seen,” said La Plata County Commissioner Elizabeth Philbrick, who is concerned about the financial impact of the flooding, especially for low-income residents.
“Some of the people who are living with the least have also lost the most,” Philbrick said. “Everything they have ever owned is gone.”
Philbrick estimates La Plata County's flooding response and recovery costs could be in the tens of millions of dollars. The county is currently working with state and federal agencies to make a strong, accurate case for federal disaster relief, including funds from FEMA.
“FEMA is not a guarantee,” Philbrick cautioned. “We have to apply for FEMA. What we’re trying to do here is make sure that this doesn’t fall on the back of those of us who cannot afford to give anymore.”
FEMA officials are assessing damage this week in La Plata County. On Tuesday, Colorado Department of Transportation officials estimated that repairing recent flood damage to roads and bridges in southwest Colorado will cost more than $100 million.
