Boulder was among the water’s first targets. It raced into basements, sent cars swirling down battered streets, swept people away and shook everyone’s notions of safety.
The flood united in devastation of Boulder’s patchwork of diverse neighborhoods — from the affluent residents whose homes tuck into the base of the foothills, to the transients forced to leave their tents along Boulder Creek, to the University of Colorado students who used buckets to bail water from their dorm rooms before hundreds had to flee.
Set in the craggy hills of the northwest part of the city, high above the swelling creeks and tributaries, Tara Raposo’s home on Cactus Court seemed the safest place to be during what was shaping up to be the state’s worst flood in a generation.
Raposo slept soundly in her Spring Valley home as the rain pounded her roof just before midnight Sept. 11. The family had received a startling flood warning on their phone, but living so high in the foothills, they ignored it and went to bed.
She and her husband, Victor, awoke to the crash of boulders breaking through their fence and windows. It sounded like a freight train. A mudslide had swept down the hillside above, gathering rocks, trees and water that now poured through their broken basement windows.
Raposo was frantic. She called 911. Their young sons sleeping, the couple rushed to barricade the home with bags of potting soil and mulch — anything they could find.
“I told them we had a mudslide, and it’s coming through the house and the basement is filling up with water,” she said.
A dispatcher told them there was nothing first responders could do.
“Everyone was saying, ‘Get to higher ground,’ ” Raposo said. “We were the highest up and yet our neighborhood was stuck.”
Outside, the raging waters spared no corner of the city. Emergency officials closed road after road.
Less than a mile away from the Raposo home, on Spring Valley Road near Linden Drive, Nate Foster heard the rain pelting his roof and swirling into a knee-deep pond in his driveway. He saw a pair of headlights and a man he assumed was a police officer shutting down the debris-strewn road.
“But he was soaked and he wasn’t wearing a blue shirt,” Foster said. “My wife thought, ‘That guy needs help.’ “
They realized the man was their panicked neighbor, David Braddock. Wife Laura Braddock’s Lexus SUV was floating nearly on its driver’s side on the road before him. A skinny tree branch was all that kept it from washing away. The man had retreated to his own car, and Foster and others were yelling at him to stay calm, to stay inside. But the water pooling in the driveway and rushing down the street was too deep to reach them.
“The water was surging all around, and boulders were hitting it,” said Laura Braddock, who climbed to the passenger’s seat and waited. And then waited some more. “It was a come-to-Buddha moment. I was calm.”
Braddock and her husband had been sleeping in the basement that night because their hardwood floors upstairs were being refinished. They woke up to water surging in the windows and, in a haze, bolted.
“We said, ‘We’ve got to get out of here, we’ve got to get out of here,’ ” Braddock said. “I jumped in my Lexus and took off down the street. It was pitch black, the lights were out.”
The road was clearly flooded, but the fearful Braddock kept driving. “Then I started floating. I floated about 10 feet.”
Her husband, driving behind her with their golden retriever, Sky, scrambled to a neighbor’s house to call 911.
“He told them it was a life-or-death situation,” she said. “They told him they had many life-or-death situations.”
Foster, meanwhile, found a rope and hatched a plan for a rescue.
As he and other neighbors worked to reach the couple, the rain offered a momentary reprieve. The water in the driveway started to drop, and both Foster and David Braddock thought they could make a break for it.
Together, they managed to open the SUV’s hatch. Laura passed forward a 17-pound cat and then crawled out herself, climbing between her grandchildren’s car seats.
Two hours had passed.
A search-and-rescue team’s spotlight illuminated the intersection of Spring Valley Road and Linden Drive about 2:15 a.m. on Sept. 12. There were 30 or 40 people, and Foster soon realized the gravity of their mission.
The team had already found the body of 19-year-old Wesley Quinlan, who was driving on Linden near Cedar Brook Road about midnight when his car, packed with three other teens including his girlfriend, got stuck in the mud and boulders of another powerful landslide.
But unlike Braddock, Quinlan and his girlfriend, 19-year-old Wiyanna Nelson, got out of the car and were whisked away, becoming the first casualties of the flood.
Two other friends in the car made it to safety. Now the searchers with their lights were looking for Nelson, and it would be two days before they would find her body.
Soon after, Dillon Road east of U.S. 287 near Lafayette collapsed into a washed-out culvert. Two trucks and a car spilled into the gap, stranding three people. Firefighters used boats to move the people to safety from water rushing around the wreckage of their vehicles.
At 26th Street and Topaz Drive in North Boulder, Fourmile Creek swelled from its banks and raced into the first level of Josie Chacon’s home.
Her daughter, Sonia, woke her and her husband, Chenobio, and they started sealing the doors and windows with beach towels. Then, like a drill team, they started moving their valuables up the staircase to the safety of the second floor. They made trips back and forth all morning.
About 3 a.m., Chacon stood outside and watched as the roaring water consumed her street. A neighbor climbed into an inflatable raft and rescuers spirited her away.
“It hit me that I had to get out,” she said. Her daughter and husband grabbed her under her arms and carried her across the street to their waiting car, and they headed to a friend’s. The water was up to Chacon’s waist.
By 3:36 a.m., the Boulder Valley School District had announced it would close. Geno Treppeda’s wife walked down to the basement of her home in Keewaydin Meadows to tell her daughter and niece, both 17, to turn off their alarms.
“She hit the last step and I heard a splash, and I knew what was going on,” Treppeda said. There was 16 inches of sewage in the basement and more on its way. “When they woke up, they were floating. The beds were bobbing in the water. It was surreal.”
The next four days were a losing battle against the sewage; he pumped out about 150,000 gallons a day. Treppeda, who manages a restoration company, has often dealt with flood victims. Now he found himself calling around in search of pumps and Dumpsters and port-a-potties for his own neighborhood. His friends had become his clients.
And he was tallying his losses. His recording studio, gone. His pool table, gone. His in-home theater, gone. And most of his daughter’s possessions, her shoes, her clothes, her makeup, the independence she had gained by having a bedroom in the basement, gone.
But the neighborhood dodged a bullet, said Jeff McWhirter, who heads a community group in southeast Boulder, where 75 percent of homes had flooded basements, some worse than others. The area missed the deluge from the creeks and rivers but was still blindsided, he said
“It was like the slow-motion disaster,” McWhirter said. “The rain just kept coming.”
Sadie Gurman: 303-954-1661, sgurman@denverpost.com or twitter.com/sgurman
Boulder
The canyon communities high above Boulder, settled by miners seeking fortunes in gold and silver, remain a draw for people who place high value in living in places that retain the allure of rugged. The creeks that flow through them — the Coal, Boulder, Left Hand, James, Four Mile — add premium.
But when rain fell for days over areas where forest fire charred the land’s ability to retain water, those creeks became torrents and rushed east, wrecking roads and stranding communities as the now-raging waterways moved toward their meeting places — and into the St. Vrain River to join the South Platte River.
