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Interview Transcription
Interviewee: William “Bill” McCormick III, Head of Dam Safety, Colorado Division of Water Resources
Interviewer: Naomi Gerakios
Location: Clark B207, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado Date: Tuesday July 8, 2014
Transcribed by: Naomi Gerakios
Abstract: In this interview Bill McCormick, Head of Dam Safety for the Colorado Division of Water Resources, details efforts that dam safety engineers in his office made to monitor and prevent dam failure during the 2013 flood. He recounts how he and his team of engineers worked to prevent dams from failing or being breached throughout the flooding event. McCormick also discusses the role that volunteer engineers played in dam inspections during the event.
Additionally, McCormick draws attention to the role that the media played through the disaster. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Naomi: Today’s date is July 8. The time is 1:20 [p.m.]. I am interviewing Bill McCormick, and my name is Naomi Gerakios. Um, so just gonna jump right on in Bill. Would you mind stating really quickly, um where you were born and your date of birth?
Bill: Um I was born in a small town in New York called Glens Falls, upstate New York, and on ah October 17, 1963.
NG: Awesome. And um, could you tell us what your educational background is?
BM: Um, I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Geology from a state school in New York, and then I have bachelor’s and a Master’s in Geological Engineering from the University of Missouri at Rolla.
NG: Awesome. And do you have any military service? BM: I don’t. No, I have not been in the military. [Laughs]
NG: No worries, and then um just quickly, maybe a quick rundown of your prior employment before coming to your current job.
BM: Ok sure, um after graduate school I wanted to be involved in dams and tunnels. And, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to do both. I, um, and ah, so I started in Kansas City, um with a firm called Black and Veatch, a large international engineering company, um and for the first nine months worked out of the office there doing different projects. And then I got the
opportunity to come to Colorado in December of 1989 to work on a tunnel project. And um, for a one-year field assignment and I never went back to Kansas City after that. So—
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NG: Just didn’t want to leave? [Laughs]
BM: Nope, I like Colorado. So, I’ve worked um, in various capacities as a construction engineer for Black and Veech for about six years. They found other work for me to do that kept me in Colorado. Um, and then I went to Las Vegas, um to work at another large tunnel for about a year and half in 1995-1997. And then I came back to Colorado. Left Black and Veatch, went to work for a small Front Range engineering firm. Did that for two years and then I moved to Salida, where I started my own small engineering firm. And we did that for four years. [Clears throat]. And then, um got on with the state as a dam safety engineer in 2003, um, in Colorado Springs, did that for seven years, and then in 2010 I was— took a job with Division of Wildlife to allow me to get back to Salida. We had liked it and kept a house there and wanted to, to find a way to make a living there. And um, with Divison of Wildlife they allowed me to do the job from there. Um, so I moved back there and then after doing that for fifteen months, the Chief of Dam Safety position came open, and uh, they also said I could do the job from Salida, so…
NG: Very nice.
BM: …so, I’ve been there. So, I’ve been the Chief of Dam Safety for the last uh, coming up on three years.
NG: And so I’m sure there’s specialized training that you received in the course of working your way up to Chief of Dam Safety, could you talk about that a little bit?
BM: Um, well it’s, it’s my career in Colorado has been working on water related projects, so, um, a lot field experience with building pipelines and dams and tunnels and water treatment plant. Um, so that was kind of a specialized on-the-job training. Um, with the Division of Water Resources, um our training is part of FEMA National Dam Safety Program, which supports our program and programs in states across the country. But, they provide, that provides us with an opportunity all the dam safety engineers to do lots of specialized training. So, you’ve had training in hydrology and hydraulics and in embankment design and emergency action planning activities, so quite a bit of dam engineering focus and water engineering focus training we’ve taken.
NG: Very nice. And what attracted you to this type of work?
BM: Um, I think it was just the geology, um was a field. I knew that I wanted be outside, um and then when I was putting myself through college I worked heavy construction so that got me into the big um, heavy, big, big civil engineering projects. And so I put the two together and got into that. And I’ve just really liked it ever since. It’s a good mix of field work and office work. And seeing projects get built and learning about the history of existing projects. And so, and it’s uh, I
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always said that it was field to go into water because it’s, uh, there will never be any shortage of work.
NG: Awesome, absolutely. And so, in a typical day what are your major duties that you might do?
BM: Nowadays, I uh, I’ve got eleven engineers that work, that I supervise. I’m the direct
supervisor. And they are all around the state, um doing um the dam safety engineer position, um, so I theoretically manage, I manage the program and kind of set our guidelines and set our goals. We’ve got policies and procedures that um, a lot of them have been in place for a long time, and some of them don’t need to change and other ones do. So I’ll talk to my engineers about what’s going on in their areas. They all have the same basic duties just different geographic areas. And so I coordinate with them, and on any given day I might talk to anywhere from two to six different engineers about what’s going on in their area. Um, I rev-I review and do the final approval on a lot um design review projects and um, difficult situations where the dam owner or the dam engineer is trying to get the owner to do things. They’ve got problem projects they sort of ask my opinion so um, help ‘em work through difficult problems in their areas that need resolution. Um, [coughs] I’ve got several little projects of my own that, uh, keep me going. I have to manage the FEMA budget, um so I have to submit um, our project spending goals for that and then quarterly reports of what we spend throughout time, um, and other things, uh, undefined. You know, lots of stuff. It’s seems like there’s always, never a shortage of things to do.
NM: Yes, absolutely.
BM: With eleven people sending me things all the time.
NM: Um, I think you just talked about a lot of things that take up the majority of your time. Um, are there any specific management philosophies that you apply to your work?
BM: Um you know I like to be fairly hands off. You know, I don’t have the ability to
micromanage from a distance. Um, I’m in my own little office in Salida and everybody is in their own little offices around the state, so, so the opportunities to you know, over manage are kind of reduce, but my philosophy is that we’ve hired these professional engineers. They’ve all got ten-plus years’ experience, and so they don’t need a lot of direct supervision. Um, so I just try to let them do their thing, give them support as they feel they need it. Um, review their work to, with an eye toward consistency so everybody’s work looks the same and they include the same things in all their reports, and all their work products so it looks like were a unified group. So that’s kind of my job to make sure of that. Um, and then just try to keep track of my employees work enough to like I say, to guide them without being too heavy handed about it.
NG: Absolutely. And then last question, real quick and then jump into the flood. What would you say is the most rewarding and most challenging part of your work?
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BM: Um. I think the most rewarding is knowing that our program is keeping the dams safe. You know, water… storage of water is beneficial, um, in the arid Southwest, where we live. And, you know we couldn’t be here without it. But it does present risks, you know. If any of these dams were to fail it would be, um, just devastating damage. So, to know that we are doing our part to maintain the record of a dam safety branch, um that’s pretty fulfilling to catch things before they become emergencies and be able to resolve them so that they don’t have to become emergencies. That’s pretty fulfilling. Um, I think one of the challenges is uh, is working with dam owners that are maybe, under resourced, um don’t have the resources to do um, the things that we would like them to do. Or they don’t see the benefit of our trying to help them keep their assets in good condition. We get resistance from owners that like regulation, they just don’t like the government telling them what to do. So having to overcome that is kind of a challenge.
NG: Awesome. And so, um, when the flood occurred last fall how and what point did you become aware of the severity and magnitude of the flood?
BM: Well, [clear throat] You know that magnitude and severity um, did really become apparent until a few days into it. But I first, it was interesting. I first became aware of the flood, I was in ah Providence, Rhode Island. Scheduled to come home on the morning of Thursday the 11th NG: Mmhm.
BM: And uh, I think it was the 11tth. But anyway, that Thursday and um so I had a 6 a.m. flight on the East Coast, which is 4 a.m. here, which means I had to get up an hour and half before that, so my alarm went off 3:30 in the morning East Coast time. So that was about 1:30 in the morning here, which is when the rain started really falling. And, fortuitously we had started, um, just collaborating with the emergency management community more than we had in the past, about a year before that. We just, you know, started doing every, every six weeks we’d get together and talk about issues of common interest just to get to know how they worked and they got to get to know how we worked and where our paths would cross. And um, one of the things that we, that that got us into was their uh, emergency alert system. It’s called “WEBEOC.” And it’s like an email alert system that people can post their emergency situations and can ask for resources or um, they can just send awareness messages or whatever. But, anyway, when I got out of bed at 3:30 to get in the shower, I looked at my smart phone and um, there was a couple email message in there about flooding in Larimer County that had gone off at one o’clock, so about a half hour before. And originally, it just said, “Flash flood warning until 4 a.m.” Um, so I didn’t really think too much of it. And when I got out of the shower there was some new messages that said, “Flash flooding including dam failures.”
NG: Oh no.
BM: So, that got my attention. Um, you know like four in the morning East Coast time. And uh, so I went down to meet— I had a couple of engineers that I was, one engineer that I was
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dam safety engineers that were in Colorado and um, get them out of bed. And that was a little harder task than I was hoping it would be. But, we did find one. So we, we were pretty lucky to be in, you know almost in real-time, pr-pretty fast but not that we could do that much about it, but at least we knew. It made me feel better for us on the East Coast, so that I at least, because we didn’t really know other than the small area of Larimer County that the flooding was. But when I landed— So we landed in, um, in Newark, New Jersey to make a connection and we had about an hour and half lay over there and that was about five o’clock East Coast time or no, seven o’clock East Coast time, five o’clock here and it was making the news already. That there was flooding in Boulder, so they had like the Boulder campus was evacuated. So, we saw that there and I started getting emails from people. And then once we – there was three hour flight back to Denver from there and we landed, I don’t know around noon. That’s when it was, um, when we landed and left the airport, got in my car to drive and everything was just water all over the place. Even out by the airport that was like “wow it’s really rainin’ here. And um, by then I had like eighty emails and endless phone message wondering where I was and everywhere from executive director of the Department of Natural Resources to Reuters News Service and CNN and all these people that you wonder how the heck they found my name.
[Laughing].
BM: But then it just kept going from then. Um, we had, and you know we got all the engineers that we had that were all aware and trying to make phone calls to talk to dam owners to find out the conditions of their dams in the various areas. We found out about the condition of the dams that had been reported failing, you know first thing. And, um, and it just, it kept going for like literally ten days after that. It was fairly nutty. By the time um, so that was Thursday. So I stayed in Denver, um, until Saturday afternoon, just working at it. Saturday, it kind of cleared up a bit. I made it up to Boulder. We had— When I got off the plane, one of the first calls from one of my engineers in the Boulder area, who um, had a dam that was in distress, and it was ah, a pretty big dam in a pretty populated neighborhood, so it was, it was a real concern.
NG: Which dam was that?
BM: It’s called Baseline Reservoir. And, um, so that was one of the first um, real— The dams that failed in Larimer County were small dams, and we weren’t all that concerned about them given the magnitude of the rain that we knew was happening. There were small dams that we— so, if they failed the amount of water that they contribute to the flooding is pretty minor
compared to the size of the flooding that is happening already. That was our assumption, anyway. So we kind of weren’t worried about those. But, this was a big dam off South Boulder Creek that had a school right below it. Well, there wasn’t anybody there, but also it had a neighborhood right downstream of that. So it was a big concern. It was our first emergency action plan activation, which is where we work with the engineering management or the emergency management community to, to activate. To make them aware that there was a problem. So, we activated that plan at a Level 2, which is, “There’s a condition that it could the
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dam to fail, but we think, you know with some work we can keep it under control, but we’ll let you know.” Kind of that’s kind of the level of know-ness with that.
Um, and so after my engineer told me that we got him some help, so he had somebody else up there, uh, because that was another part of the problem. He was a new engineer. He had just started in March. And he’d never even seen that dam before. He hadn’t made it around to its inspection yet. Um, so he needed some extra eyes. That was also our first use of our volunteer engineers. We had an engineer that was one of the calls that took after I landed at the airport was, you know, these engineers calling and saying, “Let us know how we can help.” So that was one where I called him back and said, “Can you send me, you know a guy with thirty years’
experience out to go work with my engineer to make sure that this is going to be okay?” And they did, they sent— they had a Boulder office, so they just sent somebody out from their Boulder office, and they all worked together to work it out. So that was good. But, when I made it back to the office it was just craziness in the Denver office because that’s where my boss is. So I made it there. And they were, everybody, it was just frantic for information. And, my boss said he had kind of had enough, so we, so we, he wanted to get out into the field and go take a look at Baseline Dam, just to get a look at it for ourselves because that was the big hot thing right at that time was Baseline Dam. So, we drove um, we drove from Denver, and in Denver it wasn’t that bad. You know, the weather really wasn’t— It was grey and cloudy, and it had been raining but it, um that probably about four o’clock on Thursday. And um, so we jumped in the car and he’s driving and luckily it was a four wheel drive. Um, and crested I don’t know, I forget what the name of the hill is, but we crested the hill on ’361
, where you can see Boulder laying out in front of you. And it was just a sea of, it was just sea. It was all water. And about— it was kind of funny at the same time my wife called me on the phone and she said uh, she said, “Where are you?”
I said, “I’m headed to Boulder and to go look at this dam.” And she’s like, “I just saw on the news, they said don’t go to Boulder! What are you doing that for?”
[Laughs].
BM: And the clouds over Boulder were black, it was really ominous looking at that time. So it did look like were driving into something that we probably shouldn’t be. That was the only time that I was kind of concerned because it was like, “Is this— are we putting ourselves at risk here?” But then I was thinking, “Well this, the dam’s in trouble and this is what we do, so this is, you know what we have to do.” So settled down, got a look at it and saw that it was okay. But that was the only time that I was kind of concerned for my own safety, anyway.
But it gave me an idea of the magnitude of the problem there, just in the Boulder area. Um, and so that was Thursday. Thursday, Friday we were just working the phones. There was um, just an
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endless stream of, of reports of dams in trouble or dams failing, and so we had to try to get the best information possible to verify either that there was a problem or verify that there wasn’t and let people know to move on to the next thing. That was our goal was to resolve those reports as quickly as possible. And the travel was, was really difficult during that period of time, like how was— um we had a situation and, or actually, my engineer that was at Baseline. He ended up being out there until dark. Um, and by the time he— and it was still raining, and so I said — and he only lives in Centennial, but that’s still you know the other side of Denver – and I was like, you know, “Can you find a place to stay up there because I don’t really want you travelin’ in the dark with these floods and the rain.” So, he had a tough time finding a hotel because by then the evacuees had already found hotels and so— but, he did find one, um, there.
So the next day was the same kind of thing. There was, we had reports of, of dams in trouble but we um, it was— just concerned about sending people out there. So we tried to make the best um, the resources, the water commissioners, their field people that know and there’s lot of that are specific to certain areas, so we kept in contact with the water commissioners that knew about certain areas that we wanted to know about. Um, and dam owners so we tried to make the best of that to get um, eyes that we trusted on the dams that were being reported as being in trouble. [Clears throat].
And then Saturday morning it looked like the sun was coming out, but called back to Boulder at like four in the morning because they— the embankment was still moving a little bit and they were concerned about that. Um, but we got that resolved shortly after the sun came up and they seemed like they were in good shape. And then I drove from Denver to Salida to go to get some, to get a change of clothes because I had been out of town for the week before at this conference. And then driving to Salida was— there was got me down. I drove down the Front Range, um down through Colorado Springs and that way and that was around Pike’s Pike was just big, black clouds and looked like heavy rain and stuff. So that was kind of, that got me to see, you know just how far the areal extent of the storm, the magnitude of the storm. Um so, that was pretty interesting.
And then Sunday, I stayed in Salida for about twelve hours and came back first thing Sunday morning, into more rain, driving through more rain back up through Colorado Springs. And that was when, um we really started, we did kind of a thing that were pretty proud of, um, to engage the volunteers that had all asked to participate. And at that time we w— by then we had seen, you know, we had the reports from El Paso County all the way up through Jefferson County, Boulder County, Larimer County about just the extent of this. And there was um, [woo!] a weather service consulting meteorologist firm that provided us some weather information. Um, that showed the extent, showed the radar data of the extent of the, of the rainfall and they had put uh, an average recurrence interval on it. Um, so that’s like whether it was a twenty year storm or a fifty year storm or a hundred year storm or a five hundred year storm, that kind of thing. And we used that. That’s how we design of the spillways for our dams, is on numbers like those, and
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so we can quickly see that there was a lot of dams under that rainfall that were— The rainfall exceeded the designs, the standard to what they were designed. So, we would expect that they might have trouble. Um, it also showed that probably the big dams that have the highest
consequence were probably okay because they are designed for an even higher standard that the rain that fell. So that gave us some comfort.
Although there were a lot of the dams, um, there, they have spillways, emergency spillways to handle these events, you know if the rain comes, but the way that the, the reservoirs are operated, they’d never let them spill because they want, all the owners of those reservoirs want to use every drop of water that’s in there for irrigation or municipal water supply or water the beneficial use is.
NG: Mmhm.
BM: So, a lot of the people that were below these dams never saw them spill. So that was a problem. And that was part of the reports of, of dams failing were actually the spillways flowing for first time…
NG: Interesting.
BM: …that anybody had ever seen. All of sudden they see all of this water coming out of the toe of the dam, but they didn’t connect that it– that’s was normal operation. But at the same time, the reservoirs now are at, at new high levels. Like, we call that a “first fill condition.” Like the reservoir has never been tested to that level before. So, even though these high-hazard dams spillways worked well, there was still some concern that this excess pressure that was on them for a time, you know, we couldn’t say “yes or no” whether that caused damage or not. And then, so that was the high-significant hazard dams. The low-hazard dams we expect to find many more of them that had failed over the, the ones that were reported that we knew about. But we couldn’t confirm that.
So, that was on Sunday when we really saw the magnitude of that problem, um, and that we would really like to be able to say, “all those dams are okay.” But we couldn’t without putting our own eyes on them or putting sets of eyes on them. We couldn’t really do that, so that’s when the idea came of putting together a volunteer engineering— a volunteer inspection program. Because we had through Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday we got continuously emails and phone calls from engineers, you know, who were willing to provide services to you and some of the bigger ones said at no cost. Not all of them said that.
NG: [Laughs].
BM: But of some of them said at no cost. So by Sunday afternoon we were just saying, “Well let’s just, you know call their bluff. They said they wanted to help, we’ve only got, you know eleven people to inspect.” We ended up, we started with a number that was close to 500 hundred
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dams that in this area that we were worried about, and through a process of some more analysis we were able to reduce that down to about 207 was the final number that we decided that we really wanted to get emergency inspections on. We wanted to know about these.
NG: Were they big, small, or a mixture? BM: All categories, yeah.
NG: Okay.
BM: So they had hazard dams, we have three main categories: low, significant, and high-hazard based on the consequences of if they fail. But yes, there was all those categories were in there. Um, the, probably the majority were the smaller ones, but, excuse me, we wanted to be sure. So, um, so on Monday we— It was still kind of raining Sunday into Monday and we’re still dealing with these incidents that happened. We did find some dams that came up that did have structural problems that had water in them that action had to be taken on. There was probably a half dozen of those that kept us busy. You know, everyday there was at least one of those, um and then everyday there was other ones that were reported that we had to go track down. So all that’s happening in the background and then there’s, so there’s a group of field people doing that. The engineers were running around chasing those down, we had conference calls in the morning. Or we ended up having them in the evening at 5 o’clock. We had a conference call just to “What did you find today?” kind of conference call.
Um, and I think on Sunday we also started manning the emergency operations centers for the first, um. So we had made connections with the emergency management community, so we knew who they were, but we didn’t really know about EOC’s2 and that kind of stuff. You know we had heard all about it, but we really didn’t know how it worked. But, once we started having problems at dams where we needed to get stuff, we needed work done or resources immediately, we found out that the EOC was really, that was the best place to go because they were like the clearing house for— So had an EOC in Larimer County, up in Larimer. They had one up in Boulder. They had the main state one in Centennial, and starting on that Sunday, we started putting our engineers there, at least for a few hours every day. So that we could update them on— they would bring questions to our engineers: “What do you know about this dam, this dam, this dam?” We could either tell them what we knew or find out about it for the first time and then chase it down. So.
And Sunday that’s when we started bring people over from the West slope ‘cause we have east slope engineers and west slope. There’s six engineers on the Front Range from Pueblo to
Colorado Springs, Denver, Greeley, and then there’s five engineers on the West Slope. And until Sunday, they were all— the West Slope guys and gals were just kind of over there, you know, they listened in on the conference calls we had, but the Front Range people wer-where they were
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impacted were doing most of the, they were doing the work. Um, because part of it was that we didn’t know how long it was going to go on…
NG: Mmhm.
BM: …you know that was the magnitude question, to get back to your question there. It just kept going and we didn’t know but, on Sunday some of the pieces started falling into place. It’s like, “Okay, now we’ve got more things to do, so let’s bring people over that can help.” And so, this volunteer inspection program was one of the first— or the EOCs that was the first thing. It’s like “Okay, well we can— We need help to send engineers to know about dams,” to these EOCs, so they can you know, know what— whether there’s a problem or not and help the EOCs. So we started doing that on Sunday with our engineer from Glenwood Springs came over, she was one of the closest. So she came over and helped, helped in Boulder and helped Jefferson County that kind of area that she could off of I-70, fairly closely.
And then on, ah, Monday we decided that we were gonna go with this, with the volunteer inspection program. We were gonna build this program to take advantage of all these engineers that were volunteering. We knew had this, we needed to inspect 207 dams within a week kind of thing. And so, so that was the first thing, first call on Monday afternoon was to a consultant to say, “Send me two engineers and a work processing person, because we need to build the
program tomorrow.” So Tuesday was— um, the people that were in the office, myself and two of our engineers were just focused on that. We had, we had to develop a scope of the inspections, what these people were supposed to look at. We had to develop a waiver so that the state wouldn’t get sued, and the engineers wouldn’t get sued, and everybody was going to be okay with it. We had to develop a letter to the dam owners saying, “These strange engineers are gonna be on your property to come look at your dams. Immediately.” Um, so over the course of that day we developed this fifteen-page scope document. We had a waiver. We had the Attorney General. We had a representative from Attorney General’s office with us to develop the legal language for the waiver, um, and but by the end of that we did like fourteen hour day on Tuesday with the consultants, and by the end of the day we had a pretty good document. And then we had to get all the information on those 207 dams ‘cause part of inspections is, you can’t just send somebody out there that’s not familiar with it and ex— you know, they don’t what what it might, what the issues might have been before versus what is now. So, we had to pull from our databases like the last inspection report and any engineering information we could have for each one of those dams. And so, that’s where some of our other internal people um, our records management people pulled together. And they—we gave them the list of dams and said, “Pull everything you have for all these.” They found a space on a FTP site for us, where we loaded it all up. And, that process went on from like Wednesday, Thursday, Friday… We finished up the scope. We got the list. We put the list of dams together with the list of engineers that had volunteered, and then we devised how we were going to assign them. That was another, “How are we going to tell, which engineers to do what inspection?” So what we came up with there was we had the list and on Friday afternoon, we had a little meeting Friday morning where any
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engineers that were interested came in and we had a face-to-face meeting where I talked about the program and what we were gonna do and how it was going to work, and all that. And then after that meeting, we sent out the list. We gave it to the people that were there, we emailed it to everybody else that we had that said, “Whoever sends us the, the inspections they want to do, so you put your name next an inspection and send it back to us. Email. And whoever gets that email to us first, that’s whose name comes in. Um, and then if you, if there’s duplicates, then we’ll just, just match the engineer that was second with some other dams or whatever.”
So it ended up being a pretty fair process. You know, we thought. And then by then, all the engineers from the West Slope had come in to Denver, so all twelve of us were together. We broke out those lists of 207 dams into, I think we had nine, there was, ten actually, ten of the engineers were group managers. So they were each given a group of dams and consultants and they— that’s— so they had a point of contact. The consultants had ah, you know for twenty dams had one point of contact. So we got all that together and um, that was on— That pretty much, all that was ready to go on the Friday the 20th. So, within you know like seven or eight days of the flooding happening, we had people starting to do the emergency inspections. By the end of the next week we had done like seventy percent of the inspections had been done. So that was kind of cool to be able to do that. But that sort of, speaks to the magnitude of the probl— of the dam and the flooding and, um—
NG: Thank you, that was fascinating to hear about. Um, a couple questions I was gonna ask you, just based on listening. Um, when you were talking about a dam being in distress, um, what sorts of actions do the engineers take when they are inspecting them and then also, to prevent them from breeching or err. I’m not, you know.
BM: Right, well for example the Baseline Dam. The distress there was, the rain had saturated the embankment itself and it’s just— it’s ah, you know… it’s an earthen embankment with a certain geometry and its stable when it’s dry. But that area had gotten like fifteen inches or rain at that point, so it saturated the soil. And then downstream slope of the dam had slid. Not all the way, but it had slid enough to know that there was a problem and there could be more sliding coming. So, that was based on the owners’ observations. The owners had their caretakers out there, and they saw this and they called us and said, “Please come and help us figure out how to do this, so, or how to fix this or prevent it from getting worse.”
So, in that case, they went out and they found ex— just walking the dam they found the extent of the cracks and where the unstable soil was. And then they take like action to prevent it from getting more saturated. So in that case, they dug trenches to drain the water away from the dam or off the top of the dam into the reservoir. And then they brought out um, plastic sheeting, like that “Visqueen” they call it. It’s like ah, just plastic sheets that comes in big rolls, you know a couple hundred feet long and twenty feet wide. And they just draped that all over the dam where the problems were, so that no more rain could get into that soil. And then the final thing— and then they set up monitoring locations. Pretty simple, just crude monitoring so that they could tell,
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because once they covered it over they couldn’t see it anymore, but there could still be problems happening underneath this plastic. So they set up monitoring, so that they could monitor that and that’s what the call at four in the monitoring on Saturday morning was about, the caretakers had seen some movement in those monitoring devices. And so Saturday morning, the response to that was, by then the owner had delivered some more fill material to the site. So they started
spreading that, placing it along the toe of the dam to buttress, to provide support for this steep slope they put material up on it so it couldn’t— it would hold it from sliding anymore. Um, so that was Baseline Dam.
There’s other situations. there was one called Gaynor Lake up in Boulder County Open Space that the water started leaking around the outlet pipe. It was, ah the reservoir hadn’t been that high before and in fact, the water found a weakness where the pipe penetrates the embankment, and it was starting to carry the soil material with it, which is called “piping failure” problem scenario. So, the fix for that is to bring, again bring more material and add it to the dam. In that case it had to be a material that would provide a way that the water to go through, so that it wouldn’t just back-up more water into the embankment.
So, a lot of its space, time, and physical observations and then what we call “failure modes.” There’s um, you know we look for those progressive things that could ultimately lead to a failure like, ah slope instability or an ero— or ah, internal erosion, piping scenario. And then for each of those failure modes there’s, you know potential fixes that you can do depending on where it’s happening and um, the level of severity of it and that sort of thing.
NG: Interesting. And then the other question I have, when you were talking about the magnitude of the event, uh when you were talking about spillways, um and uh, do you think there is any way for your office to educate people better on spillways, since they’ve never seen them or way to be more prepared for that and get information, disseminate it or…?
BM: Right, that one of the lessons learned. You know, we’ve done a few things. We’ve done some after action reviews and things. So that is an area where we want promote education, is through that. When we started to do that, we’ve had— This spring, we’ve had the opportunity for four, well two, what we call regional emergency planning exercise and we developed, we found some nice video, some animations that exist on dams. And so one of them talks about “hazard-creep,” which is all the development encroaching on a dam. Another one is about operation of spillways versus overtopping failures. Another one is about this piping, this internal erosion failure of a dam. So, we’ve put those three videos along with a couple real-world videos we got from the flooding into ah, about an hour long program. We’ve presented that three… or four times now this spring to most of the emergency managers, dam owners, some first responder kind of people because everybody was kind of confused by that. We got even first responders, like the fire chief on a dam didn’t understand what he was looking at. So we have taken some steps and we’ve gotten some good response. A lot of light bulbs have gone off. We’ve probably presented that to ah, maybe a hundred and thirty people now give or take. But, we’ve had really
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good comments to those that people thought that was really helpful. Like I told you before, that’s one of our goals is public awareness and education process and that will certainly go into it because that was, especially in these areas where developments are right up against the dams and the owners don’t normally let it drop out, they need to know the difference.
NG: Is that what happened with Olympus Dam up near Estes3? I’ve heard a couple people said, you know, letting the water out as the event happened or was it the spillways?
BM: Um, at Olympus Dam that’s a Bureau of Reclamation dam. And that’s one thing to
remember about these dam is that very few of these are flood control dams. So they’re not really meant to hold back the water; they are meant to maintain it, you know at a certain level. So that’s what Olympus Dam is. They have an operating procedure that they don’t really want it to go above a certain level, um, at least not for very long. So at Olympus, they can let out a lot of water. It’s a big dam and they’ve got big outlet gates, so they can really control the level of their reservoir.
NG: Mmhm.
BM: And so that’s what they were doing. They were trying to match basically outflows with inflows. And I think it took them awhile. I think they were behind when they started that. You know, the inflow that was coming in was much higher than they might have even been able to let out, but that’s why they were letting out the water. Is that they didn’t want it to spill. They wanted to feel like they had control over the reservoir. So they are saying, “It’s coming in but were letting it out at a known rate and therefore were controlling it.” Whereas, if they had just let it go over the spillway then it’s, you know, it’s out of their control at that point. And so they didn’t want that to happen. So, so that was uh, you know uh, a procedure that they had so that— and it did, I think they got up to— you know, every time they made a gate change I would get a phone call from them, um because it was an unknown usual operation so that’s part of an emergency action plan as well. So I got a call from a guy named Howard Baily up in the
Loveland office, like every time they made a gate change, he’s, “We’re going up to this. It’s, the reservoir elevation is this level.” And um, you know this this is, sorry I’m just [inaudible] at my book.
NG: Mmhm. BM: Okay.
NG: How well do you think your office was prepared to respond to the challenge of the flood? BM: You know, I think we— we didn’t really have mu-a plan for that kind of an event ahead of time. Um, but I think in spite of that we, we did really well. We had made some inroads with the
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emergency management community, so at least we knew who the people were there and we sorta got up to speed qui— pretty quickly with the information that we had.
Um, like I said after Sunday we really, that’s when, so we lost maybe the first three days, were a little chaotic, and it would have been better if we had, if we you know had a plan. But, by the fourth day we came upon like the three overarching goals is what we call them, which was to be able to address the ongoing incidents, the reports of dams having— uh, in trouble. Um, we had to man the EOCs to make sure that they, that everybody there was uh, situational aware of the dams. And then we had to get this emergency inspection program together and out. So once we had those three goals, we got the people in to assist with those three pieces of the puzzle. And then things went pretty smooth after that, we, relatively speaking.
NG: Do you still have um, the emergency inspection with volunteers that you’re talking about? Do you guys have that as a more formal emergency plan now, where you could maybe call them up again and say, “Hey, you guys did so great the last time. How about this time?”
BM: You know, we got that, we’ve got um…. We had always an emerge— had a dam engineer sort of mailing list. Email list and that, but we’ve added that to that. So our engineer in-Colorado email is up to like 300 now, so, and we’ve got the forms. We’ve got the scope documents, so everybody knows what the liability stuff is, so we certainly could pull that off the shelf pretty easily now. Um, the other thing we’ve done is we’ve got a draft um, internal emergency action plan just for ourselves that were working on this summer, so that we do have a plan for next time that’s a little bit more defined. So that was part of after action review stuff. We did an after action review of our activities in um, November,…
[Clears throat].
BM: …which, might have been a little too soon, but we captured a lot from the heat of things. Um, but that was one of the big things in that was um, now that we know how it might go, we can build a plan pretty… um, that’s realistic… and that was part of thing during this flooding, you know we— we’ve all gone to emergency action plan table top exercises and orientations and um, in training on that, but your always just training for one dam emergency at a time. Um, you know. And we were all just kind of, in the inc— in the middle of the craziness just laughing saying, “If you put this scenario out for an exercise for people would say ah, that’s unrealistic.” NG: [Laughs].
BM: You know people would lose interest so fast because it would just, it wouldn’t seem real. So now we’ve got examples.
NG: Yeah, it can happen to you too.
BM: It can happen to you too, yeah. There is no book for you know, how to handle emergencies and forty dams all at once.
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NG: Um, you know I— you talked about how talked um, or worked with the EOCs and EOMs a lot, were there any other agencies that you found yourself interacting with that you don’t
typically talk to?
BM: Um, you know the— the media was a big one that we interacted with that we don’t, you know even, like I said, some of the messages on my voicemail when I landed in Denver on that Thursday were from media outlets who I had never heard before, um, and they were pretty helpful because, like I said, we quickly decided that probably the big dams were probably okay, but there were probably a lot of little dams that people really should be aware of and be worried about. And through the course of the interviews that we did with the media, you know,
essentially it was at least once a day, sometimes twice a day I would get called to go down to our public information, our chief information officer, his office and we would um, pick up the phone and just call six or eight media outlets that had been calling and wanted ask some questions. So we did that once or twice. But, you know, once we got our message and got our feet under use then we would try to convey that, we would try to answer their questions honestly and truthfully. Um, but then we would also try to ask them for help, to use them, their voice to get word out that the big dams are okay, don’t worry about those but your keep eye out for those neighborhood ponds that might be you know, could cause some damage. They wouldn’t normally cause damage but now with all the extra rain they might be more of a hazard. So that was an agency that we worked with, um, then the emergency managers.
I talked more with our executive director’s office than I ever have before. You know that’s way above my pay grade but they were interested. Um, the governor’s office were very interested in dams, and we did a pretty good job. My boss is pretty smart that way, and he even by Friday he had us collecting data so that we could build some, do some GIS4 work and build some graphics to show what was happening…
NG: Very cool.
BM: …in our dam world. So he was smart enough to get us onto that, so by Friday afternoon we had some, some pretty good summary graphics of the areal extent of thing and what had been kind of happening. We had three different ones that we put together quickly. One was the EAPs that had been activated.
NG: What’s th— emergency…?
BM: Emergency action plan. So we had the ones that had been activated, we knew about a number of dams that had failed by that point. So we had all the dams that had failed and their locations and then we had all the dams and spillways that had run that wouldn’t typically run. So we had those three graphics. And it was funny, because Saturday morning just as I was kind of— after we had finished up in Boulder, um I was on my way out of town. And I got a call, you
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know, “Do you have any graphics on what’s going on with the dams?” I was like, “Well, as a matter of fact, yeah.” And so you know with the hit of a couple of buttons I was able to forward this information down to emergency operations center, and I don’t know if the governor was there, who was there but an immediate email response saying, “You know, you made a lot of people happy down here by knowing that stuff.” So that worked out good. And then on Monday we had some more graphics of the emergency inspection program because we had combined the rainfall data with where the dams were and apparently th— I didn’t actually see it, but that the governor had a press conference and we had made this huge poster size graphic of that, and that was his backdrop for his press conference. So.
NG: That’s pretty cool.
BM: Yeah, it was kind of. You know just had the right information at the right time. Um, so, so that worked out. So we dealt with the governor’s office more than I had before. And, yeah, just that was probably it. We had Fish and Wildlife Service, a dam failed out at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, so we worked with them a little bit.
NG: Which dam was that?
BM: It’s called Havana Street. That was a small flood control dam really, but there was a lot of water in that drainage out there. I think that was mostly who we were working with…
NG: Did you find yourself using um, new technologies or social media more than before to kind of disseminate information and the maps and all the things you guys were developing?
BM: You know, we didn’t really have the technology to tap into that, um as much as maybe could have. I think we tried a little bit. For instance we tried to piggy-back on with other people’s capabilities since we don’t have ourselves. Um, like we pushed a message through the
emergency um, managers through the state emergency management office through their social media outlets to try to get the word out that the emergency inspections were going to happen. So we crafted a short message for that, um, so we combined with the regular letters that we sent out with the social media blast saying “here come, you know, these inspectors are coming under our direction. Please be nice to them.” Um, so did use that a little bit.
Um, you know it’s interesting after the fact we found out about the use of social media, um the Boulder County emergency manager, they have their own social media person that’s like
dedicated to watching social media and doing that. And at one of the presentations that I was part of in February, I heard the guy say that they had, they had, they figured out pretty quickly, I guess that they shouldn’t worry about being 100 percent accurate with all their information because if they did that there was somebody else who was 70 percent accurate that was gonna be ‘em to the social media punch, so to speak. And that that’s what it was all about, getting
followers to your tweets or whatever you’re putting out. Um, so they, they had to shut down somebody that was tweeting bogus information. They had to send somebody over to— I don’t
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know how they found out where he was, but they send somebody, like a sheriff to his house and said, because they couldn’t arrest him but they told him to stop it. Um but they said, if they can be 80 percent accurate and get more of the percentage of social media people listening to them, they can make corrections later on that were easier than trying to catch up with somebody else’s wrong information.
So we would maybe use that more in the future. And that’s something to look into. Like I said were a relatively small group so we can’t do everything. Um, but it was interesting. You know I heard of negative things from social media as well. There was somebody got the National Guard all riled up in Lyons that Button Rock Dam— and actually went around with a megaphone in the middle of the night saying, “Button Rock dam was failing. Move to higher ground.” You know based on a wrong Facebook something or another because that dam was never in danger of failing. You know a lot of water went through the spillway like it was supposed to and caused a lot of damage downstream but the dam itself wasn’t in danger. So, but it was— just from th— at the time, we didn’t have the capabilities. We tried to use them a little bit with other people. We tried to use the media more to steer, to get the messages out more than did with social media itself. But, you know after the fact we learned a few lessons and maybe things to be aware of, things to shoot for to be ready for next time.
NG: Interesting, definitely sounds like there’s a lot of confusion going on during the event. BM: Yea, well there’s just so many, you know, so many outlets for that— there’s so many different ways for people to get information. Um, so just trying to get the right information out there as quickly as possible.
NG: Tough job. During all of this, how were your interactions with dam owners? Were they pretty willing to work with the inspectors as they came out during the event? Or were they a little more hesitant?
BM: You know, I think they were by and large they did really well. You know we had two different levels of interaction with the owners. We had the initial one, where we were just trying to figure out if dams were in trouble and that was our own dam safety engineers that the owners knew. And I think by and large they were super cooperative. You know, they worked with our engineers really well. To be able to get good information, “Yes my dam’s ok. Um, no there’s spillway flowin’. No, there’s spillway flows. No I want you to come out and see.”
So we had good, good interaction there. Um, I think there was a little bit more hesitancy once, when we sent the volunteer engine-engineers out, people they hadn’t seen before. You know, we require them to go out in teams of two, just for safety reasons. We didn’t want anybody out there, you know, wandering around on their own. And so I think maybe, when they saw these, you know, two or more people come out to their dams they were a little more suspicious or, not. I don’t know if there was a lot of interaction between those two or not, but um, but I think by and large, you know they understood that we were trying to just verify things and make sure
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everything was alright and, and I didn’t hear of any— There was one dam up near Fort Collins which was kind of on the edges of the area we were worried about anyway, so we didn’t get stuck on it, but the owner wouldn’t let anyone on his property. So, you know, we couldn’t go look at that dam. But luckily it wasn’t one that was, you know, really concerning to us anyway. But that was the only real negative thing that I heard.
NG: And then, just kind of an overall broad question. During an event like this, you know I see you had the high and low risk dams. How much of a risk overall did they pose overall during the event? I don’t know if that’s a loaded question or not.
BM: Um, well I mean the dams were all, they were you know loaded in the, like the, the range of loading conditions I guess maybe put that in, um was from the small dams with a low design standard their loading was extreme. Let’s say, so the risk of them— you know, I think overall the risk of problems at the dams went up,…
NG: Okay.
BM: …you know, during that event because this is a new, unusual load. Some of the dams had been designed for that. Some of them hadn’t. Some of them had been designed for but had never been tested to that level before so we never know. You know, first filling is always, that’s always the first test of your, of any design. You know, can it handle the load it was designed for? Some of these had seen more water than they ever had before, so that’s that first filling. We’ve
increased the load, it’s still within the design, but we don’t know, you know, were still verifying the design at that time to make sure it’s gonna hold. Um, so yeah the risk went up, considerably. And that, that’s why the stress level of all the dam safety engineers went up correspondingly. Um, until we could verify th-that things were okay, and so it might have been a perception of risk, but I think it was you know, it was justified because of all the uncertainty and the unkowns and all the new conditions that we were having to quickly evaluate. So yeah, I mean this is ah, any event that, that stresses the system like that, um, pushes some dams over their design and other ones seem to go right up to it. It’s gonna increase the risk at least in a short term kind of time frame anyway.
NG: Interesting. And then I have like two or three more questions for you. Um, what were the most important lessons you learned in terms of preparation, planning, management, and so on? BM: Um, I think part of it is to at least have ah— have some kind of a plan, some kind of structure. Like I said we got, you know really great staff that um, most of them came into the situation and were just thrown in. Just, you know, “Go do this,” and they would just run with it. Other ones were more, um, you know structured engineers, and they needed to have a little bit more information before they can, you know they’re not— You know how some people think on their feet better than others, so we had some of that. So a plan would help those people, would help, you know, kind of level that field so that everybody sort of knows and can work to their strengths and do the stuff. So that was the big thing.
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Communication, another technology thing that I didn’t mention was, like I said, I had gotten a smart phone like three weeks before this all happened? Um because I was driving around the mountains and I was— I’d be flooded with emails when I got back home when I could have just been ticking them off a little at a time. So, literally I was new to smart phone technology. Some of our people, um not everybody on our staff gets a state issued phone, so some of them had their own smart phones. So, let’s see, we had myself, one, two, so we had three of us, out of the first seven that were working, you know th— you know, that were impacted the hardest and working immediately. Three had smart phones and four didn’t. So that, that was a communication gap. You know, we had to wait for those people to call us or, or us to call them, directly. Um, we couldn’t do mass emails or mass texts or any of that kind of stuff very well. So that was a lesson learned was to get everybody on a common platform. And we recognized that on like Tuesday. I ordered everyone smartphones for everybody else. So by Thursday everybody had a smartphone that needed one. Some people had them already and so that was kind of fun to watch too, these old…
NG: [Laughs].
BM: … engineers trying to figure out this new stuff, but that helped, um, halfway through. And that was a lesson learned. Um, I think the other thing was just getting out and collaborating with ah— You know, that was a real benefit to us was the collaboration we had started with the emergency management community. Just those, finding those areas of common interest I call ‘em. So we’ve got those and you know, with the emergency management community. We’re trying with the floodplain management community that’s another kind of, opportunity that we have. Um, we had done a little bit of that, up to that point too, so we kind of knew each other. We didn’t interact that much or at least I didn’t at my level, maybe the engineers did at their levels, but I didn’t interact as much with the floodplain managers as I thought I would’ve. Other agencies that we don’t usually coordinate with, um to go fill in some blanks here is the Corps of Engineers5 and Bureau of Reclamation. Um, we coordinated with them ‘cause they were um, the three big Corps of Engineer dams in the Denver area: Chatfield, Cherry Creek, and Bear Creek were all taking on water and they wanted to release the water in the midst of this um… flooding, so we were like, “Do you really have to do that?” You know, ‘cause those ar— They had just a ton of storage. Um, and so that was kind of an interesting collaboration, we did talk about it. They gave us a few days reprieve before they had to start lowering the reservoirs but we worked with them.
I worked with the State of Wyoming. Um, they found that the emergency management community turned me onto this process “EMAC,” which is an Emergency Management Assistance Compact. Um, which is a state to state agreement and we have um, Colorado has agreements with Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming and Utah and New Mexico. And so, basically
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they— it takes all the liability, roadblocks away and lets their engineers work in Colorado, you know with a Wyoming license. So we had, like we had dam inspectors from um, part of the program were— they sent two from Wyoming down into inspect the dams up and around the Wyoming-Colorado border. Those guys were closest out of Cheyenne, so they just came down. Um, we also had “FERC,” the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They have regulatory duties in Colorado for dams that make hydropower, um and so they volunteered. They um, sent four engineers out to go inspect dams as part of our program too. In the end our inspection program was pretty cool. We had 113 different engineers, um that represented 27 engineering firms in the Front Range, and four federal agencies and one state agency all volunteered to help Colorado.
NG: That is very cool.
BM: Yes. Cool to be a part of and just to see the support from that community. It’s pretty neat. Um, I got off topic there, quite a ways.
NG: No, you’re good. I— just talking about lessons learned from the event and—
BM: So, yeah I think communication, plan, collaboration, um, and then, you know finding a way to use— I’ve given, I gave a presentation a national conference in April and that was one of the things I pointed out to these other — it was in California— and I said, “I know if California has a big earthquake there’s questions of this infrastructure you know the engineers are all gonna want to help so, have those plans in place. You know, know how you're gonna do it. Or at least have an idea of how you're gonna do it. So that you can do it quickly.”
Um knowing the resources that are available and those times and having at least some general idea of how you might use them. And if you don’t have specific, you know, tools.
NG: Did, um you just spoke to being prepared and having those plans? Did the flood change any of your other ideas about preparation and planning, um and management?
BM: Um, no. I-I think it’s all pretty well covered in that. We know what we had to do. What we were asked to do or required to do. Now that’s just putting that just more into of a structure, “If this happens do that,” kind of thing. I think with ours the biggest thing was, um we got a little criticized for not bring the— our counterparts from the— the West Slope over soon enough. You know everybody was swamped over here, and we-we should have brought them over sooner to start doing work. But at that time, we didn’t know how long it was going to go, we barely knew what we were doing to start with, so to add more people to the mix, at least that was my
perspective— it’s like, just trying to figure out what to do with the people I have… NG: Mmhm.
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BM: …I have more people standing there asking me “How I can help?” You know, I it wasn’t going to do me any good at that point. That’s why I was— it was nice t—, once those three categories fell into place then it was like, “Okay, how fast can you get here? We have something for you to do.”
So the only thing— that were um, my— and it’s not really ah, it’s more of a policy or a
procedure kind of thing, the— the idea of small dams. You know everybody— they were a big problem up around Estes Park and other places where place with the right amount of land or resources think they all, everybody has to have a little farm pond. Or a little fish pond in their front yard, and they don’t realize the— the hazard that proposes and um and the— you know, what the risk their putting their neighbors and downstream people into, so. If I had my way, I’d rather have them have built fewer but bigger dams, you know, the larger dams that it’s
economical to build those safeguards into. You know, with these small dams you can’t— it’s not economical to design them not to fail, you know in a rainfall amount like that. It would just some big, ugly concrete structure. So it would defeat the purpose. Um, but I’d like to see those little dams go away and just be replaced by maybe some regional ponds that it makes sense to build bigger and stronger and you know provide more of a regional resource to the people, as opposed to everyone having their individual resources. Um, but that’s, that’s ah, public policy perception thing.
NG: A long battle to wage. BM: Yes, exactly.
NG: Um, are there any other topics that we’ve covered that you want to return to for clarification or anything you think that we should know that we have gone over?
BM: Um, I don’t know. The only other thing that’s come up with the dams that failed, that’s like a public perception, kind of issue. Is that we got called to the ah, the Little Thompson River, which was one of the tributaries that um— it’s only— it’s more heavily populated and Highway 36 crosses the drainage only about halfway through the drainage. In this case, it’s between Lyons and Estes Park and its, ther— there— the drainage goes out towards, um Loveland and Milliken and Berthoud, I think, which is down here [points at packet6]. But, anyway this was th—the five dams that failed in a row and, um—
The people down below thought that it was the dams— it was the failure of the dams that caused all the damage. So we heard from them in… February, cause we had just assumed that the
dams— that the amount of rain that fell, it, it was within our assumption that the volume of water was too small to really cause any more problems. But the people downstream in this area, in this
6
Packet is located in the interviewee’s folder titled “Report of September 2012 Little Thompson River Flooding and Big Elk meadows Dam Failures.” McCormick points to a map on page 1 of the report.
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little community here7, kind of felt they were— or this little community right here on the
drainage, felt they were overlooked. And um, we ended up having a public meeting with them to talk about this.
NG: What community was that?
BM: It was um, it’s we called it the “X-Bar 7 Ranch” community. And I was gonna suggest you go— there’s a couple people there that probably oughta be a part of this project. But, you know this was a guy’s property, 8 um, that the silo was perfectly intact, and this was like a hay meadow before the rain. So this flooding came down and just stripped all the soil, put a bunch of big trees in his thing, his silo. This is um, a location where it’s a little bit further downstream from that one but there used to be a 4,000 square foot house that sat right here9. Um, the stream used to go all the way over that way and this was a big cottonwood groove and more hay meadow. Um, like I say these people were evacuated and they, um, they moved their French antiques to the upstairs so they wouldn’t get wet, and then they came back, you know two days later and there was nothing left.
NG: That’s wild.
BM: It was crazy. This was their well. It’s in the middle of the stream now, and wells aren’t supposed to be in the streams. Um, but these guys— and they thought all this damage was due to the dams, but it was interesting— it got us out to see this. You know, we wouldn’t have seen some of this devastation otherwise, and in the end we, we did a study and wrote this report that showed that it was the peak of the flood was much higher than the little spikes that were caused when the dams failed. So it was the massive rain, but, you know, it just got us out into the community and um, made ya feel some empathy for the people that were impacted by that and, I don’t know gave more— just drove home the idea of why we— you know, why we have to make sure the dams don’t fail. So that— cause if a big dam failed it would do that kind of damage to a place like that. So, um, so that was enlightening and that was after.
You know, that was… we didn’t really see that coming. We had, we had gone up— part one— One of the things that we did, um towards the tail end, once we got the emergency inspections process up and running and seemed like the incidents were under control, we were able to send people around um, to different places to check on things and um, one of the things we did is we sent engineers up to where the dams failed and they collected forensic information. So that we could back-calculate you know, what their peak discharges were and um, just information that’s useful for predicting, you know, what the effects of dam failures, um, and so we went and gathered all that information, and we just kind of set it aside and we really weren’t doing
anything with it. We thought about it, but, and then we got this call from these people and it’s
7 Points again at map on page 1 of the report. 8
Points to picture at the top of page 39 of the report.
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Bar 7 Ranch, Blue Mountain, I think it’s area, um, and they— they're, they were convinced it was the dams that failed. Or they just wanted to know and it was really— It became apparent that they, they couldn’t get closure on this thing until they could get their head around what really, what was the cause of all this damage?
And so it felt like a good thing to do, to do the analysis, maybe over and above what we would have done just for ourselves, but to give them an idea of really what it was that caused their damage and you know, if— we were — we thought we knew the answer but we tried to keep an open mind to what the data showed. Um, but that’s — I hope we did them some good. To help them get closure that it just was thing, once in a five-hundred year flood event.
NG: Do you think um, people’s perceptions towards dams have changed since the flood? Um, you know for example, with this community how they, they thought it was the dams and so clearly there was a shift in how the viewed them before.
BM: You know, I’m not sure that there’s been that much awareness of it. You know, I think that the dam— one thing is that people think of a dam failure, um, and we got this even from
CDOT10 engineers that were studying a similar stretch. And their report said— they didn’t study the dam failures, but their report said that damage was caused by the dam failure. So, I mean— they had a perception of a dam failing must be a really bad thing, right? So that’s what part of this report tries to explain the different— not all dams are the same. Um, so I think there’s still this public perception that a dam, is a dam, is a dam. Um, but its— so we have to a— that’s way I say part of our next project is to, to try— survey the public perception of what they think, you know? And what they were, because these people— the people at X-Bar 7 are still concerned about these dams, the dams are being rebuilt. They are part of a water supply for that community up there, so they are going to be rebuilt to the same exact size that they were. They aren’t going to be any bigger or smaller. They are gonna be better construction because it’s all modern
techniques and what not, but the people down below they’re still— I mean they don’t like— now their more aware of those dams than they were before. And their not— these folks maybe more educated, but I think by and large the public— We haven’t really taken that step to educate the public as much as we could yet… There’s, you know there’s ah, it hasn’t been done a lot, there’s no real guide book for educating the public with regard to manmade risks, um, and the
consequences of manmade things, we talk about natural hazards and you know, earthquakes and mudflows and avalanches and blizzards and you know, we talk about those hazards all the time and what do for those… but people are more sensitive to these manmade risks, um so we gotta— so people haven’t really reached out a tried to educate the public on those, so they can get
comfortable with it. You know, because obviously like I said that we have to have these reservoirs in Colorado,…
NG: Mmhm.
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BM: …so they have these huge benefits, but they also have a risk and so that’s the next step is to, you know, get that information out in a way that, that doesn’t scare people. You know, we want people to be aware so they can take action if they need to. We don’t want them to be afraid so they get paralyzed by, you know fear. That’s the fine line sort of thing we have to figure out. NG: And then um, one last question. Who else do you think we should be talking to for our project?
BM: Like I said, the number one people, I don’t know who you’ve got on your list for technical people, but I was really impressed with these folks from the Little Thompson River area and so there’s a gentleman named Tom Lewis, who you should talk to about this and I can give you his email address…
NG: Yea, that’d be great.
BM: …because he has an amazing story. We walked, this is his property11
and went and toured it and walked with him. He has a wife that has um, disabilities and so they got trapped in their house in the middle of the floodplain and had t— had to weather the storm so to speak and it was just a harrowing story of the worst case scenario. Everything happening at three in the morning, with the hous— fl— or the, these big logs floating down and just slammin’ against the house and half the house washing away. And anyway, you should talk to Tom; he’s got an amazing story. I don’t know the people that own this house,12
if your— if you need to talk to them or not. Um, but he would be the first one.
Are you talking to the people from like Lyons and Jamestown? And some of those places? That were—
NG: Um, we just interviewed, um, Tara Schoedinger, the mayor of Jamestown, and then I don’t think I’ve contacted anyone in Lyons yet, but they have their own oral history project going on right now, so I’m trying not to step on their toes too much. Um, I’m actually having trouble finding people in Weld and Morgan Counties to talk to. Those have been the biggest people I’ve trying to target. I’ve shifted my attention towards—
BM: Estes Park, you’ve got that covered? NG: Mmhm.
BM: There was a gentlemen, we had another interesting— another one of the success stories. I don’t know if you have time for, but there was a place called the Aspen Lodge, which is on Highway 7. Um and the owner of that is this interesting um gentlemen named Master Chen, um and…. Um one of my engineers happened to be up in Estes for a couple days, once he figured
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Picture on page 39 of the report.
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