Near fire damaged area: Nervous waiting ahead of potential flooding
Concerns about the potential of flooding later this week have people in flood prone areas looking ahead with trepidation.
"It's just hard because it's my front yard and every time we get flash flooding," said Ardella Hawks as she worked to clean up more of the mess created with two flash floods in less than two weeks, in the Buckhorn Creek drainage southwest of Fort Collins. "It's like you're starting all over again, every time."
She and her family were working on raising structures on their property like a shed and chicken coop.
"We're raising everything," Hawks said. "We have up two or three feet. Everything."
The mountains in this area were hit hard by the Cameron Peak fire in 2020. The East Troublesome Fire added more devastation. More than 400,000 acres burned. $20 million dollars in mitigation work was done last year and another $12 million or so this year to help the Cameron Peak Fire damaged areas, said Sean Chambers, director of Water and Sewer Utilities for the City of Greeley, which gets it water supply largely from the Big Thompson Basin.
"We do a lot of aerial mulching over severely burned areas that more than likely wouldn't recover on their own," Chamber said.
That means mulching slopes less than 45 degrees. But there is a useful range. "On slopes that are roughly between 15 and 45 degrees we can have a lot of success with aerial mulching," Chambers said. "If it's much flatter than that, we think the slope will eventually recover on its own."
The mulching work is combined with other techniques to hold back soils where roots may have burned. But in the area where Ardella and her family live, there was a problem with initial data about damage.
"A lot of that didn't get accurately mapped after the fire," Chambers said. "For whatever reason, the aerial mapping didn't appreciate the severity of the burn, and so it was lower priority for us to aerial mulch."
The cost has been shared by local, state and federal government. But getting to wildland areas up high proves a special challenge with permitting.
"And we really can't get in there and address that," Chambers said. "And often, wilderness is upstream of some really critical areas that we want to protect and mitigate."
The repeat of flooding for Ardella's family has made them concerned about what could be coming next. They say there's often about a minute's warning. She and her husband say they don't sleep well. But neighbors have pitched in repeatedly to help when the creek rises and debris comes tumbling down. For that they are ever thankful, as they watch for the next potential monsoon rains that could have them fleeing to higher ground.
