When the 2013 floods came to Boulder, Lyons, Jamestown and other areas near Boulder, Colorado the effects were devastating, killing 10 people and causing as estimated $4 billion in property damage.
Two years later as people and communities work to put themselves back together, questions have to be asked, and are being asked.
Among them, is how good is our modeling? How well can we predict the likelihood of future floods of this scale? How do we rebuild in a way that protects life and property in the future without turning wild streams into cement-lined aqueducts?
The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are both asking those questions.
Right off the bat, Kevin Houck, chief of watershed and flood protection for CWCB, said it is mistaken to think of a 100-year flood as something that might happen once a century. Instead, he said, you should look at such a flood as having a one percent chance of happening in any given year.
Diana Herrera, National Flood Insurance Specialist with FEMA., couldn’t agree more. “You can’t think about it as something that happens every hundred years. If it happened last year, you’re right back to having a one in a hundred chance of it happening again this year,” she said.
She said FEMA paid about 3000 claims out of the 2013 floods, and of those about 2000 were to people who lived in areas with low to moderate risk, meaning that they were paying for flood insurance voluntarily. Today, she said, just over 24,000 property owners in Colorado have flood insurance through FEMA, with nearly 14,000 of those buying the insurance voluntarily.
“No one knows how much it is going to rain, or where or when it is going to happen. Life is not waterproof,” she said.
She urged people to learn the risks of flooding where they live. “You need to know your risk and protect against it.”
The CWCB is looking at the St. Vrain and Big Thompson watersheds, using new data to better understand the hydrology and the likelihood of future events.
David Sutley, floodplain mapping specialist with FEMA, said the state will be done with its work in a year or so and then FEMA will begin the work of using the new data to create new floodplain maps, which could take another two to three years.
He said FEMA had been using 30 and 40-year-old data in building floodplain maps and calculating risk, and that the new data being collected by the state will help FEMA create better maps and more accurately calculate risk in the future.
