100 YEAR FLOOD

I am not sure which is more nerve-racking - wild fires or flash floods.  In 2010, the Four Mile Canyon Fire came within about a mile of our place, and I wrote about it here.   And now it looks like we are in the midst of a 100 year flood here in Boulder and surrounding counties.  When the rain started last Tuesday, it was welcome - it had been fairly dry and Sunshine Creek, the small seasonal stream that flows next to our property, had dried up.  But the rain kept coming - and coming, and coming.  I emptied our rain gauge at 5" and the next day it had overflowed at 6" and today it has another 3+ inches.  At the moment, there is a break in the weather, but the forecast is that the system will not move out of here for another couple of days, although the worst seems to be past.  There is a very large low parked over Utah and it continuously pumps monsoonal moisture that appears in waves of heavy then light rains.  Because the low has not moved much, the rains tend to fall at the same places.  Boulder county seems to have been a primary target.  One can find a lot of information about the floods including places like the New York Times.  But the following are some pictures that I took of our immediate neighborhood - the very good news is that opposed to many, many folks in Boulder, our place remained high and dry.

This picture was taken just uphill to the northwest of our place - this is supposed to be a path with the creek passing through a small culvert that runs under the path from the cement wall on the left to the tree on the right.

 
Downhill from the picture above, this is the path as it passes past our place, about 20 feet from the corner of the house.  Yes - the path, not Sunshine Creek - if you expand the picture, you can see the creek on the other side of the trees that separate the path from the stream.

A bit further down hill, the path opens up to the driveway and parking outside of our garage.  The water passed by the corner of the garage [about where this picture was taken], and we kept it out of the garage with several home made sand bags.

A video of the path.

Just a bit of the debris that flowed with Sunshine Creek - and some of it was much larger than this stuff!!

Just across Spruce Street from our place are two city tennis courts that sit in a bit of a bowl next to the creek - yes, that is the very top of one of the nets in the middle of the water.

The worst seems to be over for Boulder, and thus the clean up will soon begin.  However, all of this water is going east, so many down stream places are now flooding including as far east as Kansas.  It will be interesting to see if the weather folks officially declare this to be a 100 Year Flood.