Monday, September 16, 2013

Repeat of '76

I should be working, I'm trying to, but also have live feed from 9NEWS in Denver on the other monitor. The weekend was spent looking at Twitter, the Denver Post and my home town paper.
But I didn't whip out this illustration over the past few days, this is actually an illustration inspired by another flood, called a "once in a life" time 100 year flood. The one in 1976, when I was nine which killed 144 people, I wasn't in the Big Thompson when a sixty foot wall of water wiped down the canyon in the dark of night, but my grandmother was and my family came to help her just a few days later and my brother and I hiked up high to get a first hand view of the destruction- I wrote about it HERE.
But this below isn't from thirty six years ago, this is from this weekend...
 
 

 
There should be a road, along side the river, there shouldn't be a waterfall at the mouth of the canyon near what is called "the Narrows", I think that is Drake, though I.D. ing communities in a canyon you have driven a hundred times is hard from the air. Like I said, my grandmother lived for many years in by the Big Thompson, we had a cabin up in Glen Haven. I was married up in Estes Park.
 
Funny, I feel more stress about this, then I did facing a raging fire wiping up our canyon here in the Four Corners, last fall, our house is right on the other side of the road...
 
 
But I was right there, watching the whole day the absolutely amazing fire fighters who saved my house!! and I'm concluding that being there you know what is going on, and you just get to doing what you need to, where when you are watching from afar, with nothing to do, you can well, obsess!  My family back on the Front Range are very calm and going on with their lives, none of their houses are near the flood plain thank goodness, I am heading up to Wyoming to meet up with some of them, this weekend, so will hear the stories and will be in the Front Range for Thanksgiving, when I will be able to see for myself that where I grew up is "moving on", which we Coloradoan are very good at doing, whatever Mother Nature throws at us.


1 comment:

  1. Hope you are ok Julia, flooding is so scary and happens so quickly. There has been a lot in the UK over the past couple of years but luckily not affecting us.

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