Those who lived through it will tell you that the spring of 1965 was not like other springs in eastern Colorado.
From Fort Collins to La Junta, the land shuddered and groaned, afflicted with mini-earthquakes and baby twisters, freak hailstorms and gale-force winds.
On Monday, June 14, southeast Colorado Springs was hammered by golf-ball-sized hail. Fort Carson soldiers shoveled tons of the stuff out of basements in Stratmoor Hills. Funnel clouds were sighted to the north, and one tornado touched down in Loveland, smashing trees and cars.On Tuesday, the rain and hail swept northeast, a procession of storms from Greeley to Sterling and on to the Nebraska line. The hail came so fast and thick that it blocked storm drains.
The rain pushed into Castle Rock. So did East Plum Creek, wiping out roads and bridges in its path. Lou Blanc, manager of the local Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph office, was inundated with complaints of downed phone lines. But Blanc had more immediate concerns about being inundated himself: Water was seeping under the door. It was raining so hard that it was difficult to breathe when you stepped outside, like you were standing under a waterfall.
It was no longer simply a flood. It had leapt in rank to a hundred-year flood, or even a five-hundred-year or thousand-year model, a millennial event. State patrol officers reported a wall of water estimated to be twenty feet high headed for Littleton, carrying in its wake a tangle of trees, asphalt, cars and other debris, with a second crest not far behind.It would be the darkest night in Denver’s history, a night of destruction far exceeding anything the city had ever known.
In 1858, the first significant gold strike in the area was made several miles farther south on the Platte — and petered out quickly. But that didn’t stop prospectors and land speculators from setting up competing settlements on opposite sides of Cherry Creek and giving them fancy names. Auraria. St. Charles City. Denver City.
The white men had traveled across the Great American Desert. Snow on the distant peaks aside, they knew that Denver City, or whatever you wanted to call it, only averaged a few inches of rainfall a year. It did not occur to them that in the desert you sometimes get ten years of rain all at once.The city was scarcely five years old when the inhabitants got their first taste of what the Arapaho were talking about.
And why would there be? Over the first century of Denver’s existence, the South Platte had mustered only one notable flood, in 1885. Most residents paid little attention to the river and what went on there. Since the 1870s, it had been a place of factories and rail yards, a dumping ground for whatever the city didn’t want: animal carcasses and human waste, used oil and old tires, rejected feathers from a pillow factory, paint and wood shavings, and effluent from dozens of other plants.
For all its tremendous force, the wall of water rumbling into town was only one concern. Even more worrisome, perhaps, was all the hazardous material in its debris flow. As the flood roared from the relatively unpopulated countryside to the outskirts of the metro area, it helped itself to fuel storage tanks along Santa Fe Drive. Then heavy equipment from the rail yards. Then mobile homes from trailer parks in Littleton and Englewood.
Among the hardest-hit areas were the Valverde and Athmar Park neighborhoods. The Valley Highway at Alameda Avenue was soon submerged, the river quickly spreading out across Alameda from Santa Fe to Tejon Street and beyond. A boxcar smashed into a building on South Jason Street, and firefighters watched in frustration as two warehouses caught fire, a moat of turbulent water around them. Seven people were spotted inside a nearby building and on its roof.
The current was fast, the waterway mined with trees, cars and pieces of houses. Fisher had to tack from the north to the south side of Alameda and back again to keep from being carried away by the current. Rubble battered the boat repeatedly, but Fisher somehow kept her steady. Once at the Gaslight, he pulled up close to the side of the motel while the officers, armed with flashlights, helped three men off the sign and into the boat.
And after a while, there wasn’t anything to see hardly anywhere. Harold Price, main district plant superintendent for Mountain States Telephone, headed downtown on the 14th Street viaduct at half past four in the morning, after the floodwaters had begun to ebb, and saw a city plunged into darkness. He could make out the shapes of boxcars flipped over in the train yards, but there were no streetlights. The police were directing traffic with flashlights.
It all could have been much worse. If not for the construction of the Cherry Creek Dam, the deaths in the Denver metro area could have numbered in the hundreds. The reservoir rose sixteen feet the night of the South Platte flood, but the dam held.Four days after the flood hit Denver, President Lyndon Johnson declared 27 counties in Colorado a disaster area.
. An independent agency spanning six counties, the district represents a metro-wide approach to floodplain management that has become a national model of multi-jurisdictional coordination. The brochure outlined 35 projects in all, at a staggering cost of $650 million. Most of the money was supposed to come from various urban-renewal funds, but Denver would be on the hook for more than $80 million in new bond debt. The city put together a task force with an optimistic acronym, SPARC , but it went the way of most committees — lots of memos and no action. There was no spark, and soon no SPARC, either.
Joe Shoemaker left the legislature and ran for mayor. He lost. But one day in 1974, a full nine years after the flood, he walked into the office of Mayor Bill McNichols without an appointment and asked him what he planned to do about the river.The mayor had $1.9 million in leftover federal revenue-sharing funds that he’d tagged for river improvements. He wanted Shoemaker to head a committee that would figure out how to spend it — and how to get more money.This was not SPARC.
Joe Shoemaker died in 2012, on his 88th birthday. This June marks not only the fiftieth anniversary of the flood, but Jeff’s 34th year with the Greenway Foundation. He plans to celebrate both events with a rafting flotilla of dignitaries and volunteers down miles of the revitalized river, possibly hijacking the patio at My Brother’s Bar at its conclusion.
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