On a July morning in 1982, an old earthen dam high in the Mummy Range gives out, and the first alarm comes from a man collecting trash. Boone follows the water down the valley, past the warnings that came before it. The mark it left still shows from this road.
Of all the people who might have raised the alarm that morning, it fell to a man collecting trash. Go back seven years. High above Horseshoe Park sat Lawn Lake, behind an old earthen dam. In nineteen seventy-five a state inspector hiked the half-dozen miles up to it and said it needed a thorough inspection. Two years later another called it fair and suggested the owners make repairs. A year after that a third reaffirmed a marginal rating and recommended somebody watch it when the reservoir was full. Three warnings, all of them on paper. What finally went was the caulking around one pipe. Water began to trickle along the outside of it, and once it had eaten a small channel into that earth, the channel grew fast. July fifteenth, nineteen eighty-two. The dam let go. Campers along the Roaring River heard it, and it took one man below the dam. Boulders rode that water like battering rams, twenty-five hundred vertical feet down toward Horseshoe Park. At six twenty-three in the morning, at the Lawn Lake trailhead, Steve Gillette looked up from the trash and saw it coming at him. He said it sounded like a plane crashing. He got word to park officials, and it was plain luck anybody was there to do it. Horseshoe Park took much of the blow, and what the flood dropped there dammed the Fall River into a lake of seventeen acres. Then the water backed up behind Cascade Dam, and at seven forty-two it toppled that dam too. A wall of water went through Aspenglen Campground, and two more people died. It reached downtown Estes Park, and the whole width of Elkhorn Avenue ran with mud, with a summer's stock washed out of the shops. Three dead. Damages past thirty million dollars. And then the second flood, the slow one, the one made of paper. The ditch company that owned the dam had little to its name but a one point four million dollar insurance policy, and its sixteen stockholders had their corporation standing between them and the lawyers. Washington and the State of Colorado both claimed immunity. National flood insurance covered twenty property owners out of some two hundred seventy-five. When it was all counted, flood victims saw less than a dime on the dollar, and many a business closed for good. That morning is still out there, the pale fan across Horseshoe Park, the boulders the Roaring River carried down and left lying where they stopped. Folks in Estes Park got their dime. That fan's the receipt.
Photo: Chris Light, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0