1 Interview Transcription
Interviewee: Kallie Bauer, Colorado Division of Water Resources Dam Safety Engineer Interviewer: Naomi Gerakios
Location: Colorado Division of Water Resources, Division 1 Offices, 810 9th Street, Suite 200,
Greeley, Colorado. Date: July 25, 2014
Transcribed by: Naomi Gerakios
Abstract: Kallie Bauer works for the Colorado Division of Water Resources as a dam safety engineer. When the September 2013 floods hit Northern Colorado, Bauer had only been on the job for five months. In her interview she recounts the challenges that being a new dam safety engineer presented when responding to a large-scale disaster. Bauer also notes the overwhelming presence of the news media throughout the flood event and the constant challenge of dispelling rumors that dams were failing across the state.
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NG: Today’s date is July 25th. It is five to one in the afternoon. My name is Naomi Gerakios, I
am interviewing Kallie — I’m sorry I didn’t get your last name. KB: Bauer.
NG: Bauer. Awesome, thank you so much Kallie for agreeing to participate. We are at the Colorado Division of Water Resources Division One offices in Greeley, Colorado. So, really quick Kallie would you mind stating your place and date of birth?
KB: I was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on September 22, 1973. NG: Oh wow, what brought you to Colorado? It’s a bit of a trip. [Both laugh].
KB: My parents moved back to Texas when I was uh, five, and then I went to Colorado State University for my masters.
NG: Awesome. And what were your degrees in?
KB: I have a Bachelor’s of Science in Civil Engineering and a Master’s in Civil Engineering with an emphasis in hydraulics.
NG: Awesome, what got you interested in that type of specialization?
KB: Um, I really like water and I’ve always been interested in water and working outside. NG: Fair enough. Um, and can you go over maybe, your prior employment to coming here?
2 KB: Ah, before the state I worked for private consultants in civil engineering dealing with
floodplain management and then dam construction and design.
NG: Awesome, sounds interesting. So did you receive any specific training in those positions that relate to what you do now?
KB: … I did a lot of design work, so instructions on designing dams and feasibility studies for it, and then prior to that I did floodplain management, so… modeling and floodplain permitting. And then some related to that land use management.
NG: Awesome. Thank you so much. And when did you start to work in um, water management specifically?
KB: Ah, right after school, so it would have been 1996. And that would have been in
Washington D.C. doing— working um, on a FEMA1 contract for floodplain management.
NG: Thank you and, um you know said you like working outdoors. What a typical work day like for you? Your major responsibilities?
KB: Um, I’m in charge of the dams in basically the Poudre River basin so all the way from the top of Cameron Pass down um, to the Plains and out through Weld County all the way out to Julesburg actually is the area I’m in charge of. So I do um dam inspections, design review, and then maintenance and working with the owners to ah, improve the safety of their dams. NG: Um, sorry.
KB: I don’t know does that cover it? [Both laugh].
NG: Yeah! Um—
KB: So I guess spend about half my time outside actually doing inspections of the dams and then the other half doing the follow-up reports and review of, ah, dam construction or rehabilitation. NG: Would you, just a random question, would you say more dams pass than fail your
inspections? Or—
KB: Yeah, um, most of the dams, especially— so we rate our dams based on the, ah, how do I say it? The hazard classification is based on what would happen if the dam failed. And so, typically our dams that have ah— we have three classifications: high hazard, significant hazard, and low hazard. And high hazard has the potential for loss of life. Significant hazard is the potential for…
1 Federal Emergency Management Agency.
3 [Man’s voice talking in the background].
KB: …um, just property damage. And then low hazard is more, the damage would contained to the property owner. And so, um the requirements for the dams are based on those and their more stringent as they get—the risk gets higher. And most of our high hazard dams in the state are in pretty good condition. And then we regulate ‘em so we can put ah restriction or lower the water level if there’s a concern.
[Man’s voice talking the background].
NG: Awesome, thank you. Um, have you worked on any major projects while you’ve been here? KB: Well I only started um, in April of last year. So I wasn’t on the job very long before the flood hit.
NG: Threw you a curve ball right away.
KB: Right, so I would say the major project I’ve worked on is the flood. [Both laugh].
NG: Fair enough, you’re the perfect person to interview then. Well, speaking of the flood we can just jump right into that. When do you become aware of the severity and magnitude of the flood? KB: Um, interesting enough, I was at a dam safety conference in Rhode Island. And we were catching an early flight. I was with my supervisor Bill McCormick. And so we had gotten up ah at 3 a.m. Eastern Time, and by the time I got down to the lobby he had already revived um, emergency text saying there was potential for dam failure and major flooding in Colorado. So, it was pretty early in the event. Um, and so we were on our way to the airport, and he was getting updates from the Larimer County Emergency Manager and the state emergency managers, and then we were calling um, there’s twelve of us in the dam safety branch, and we were calling ah, people that were in Colorado. [Laughs]. And touching base with them and then waking up— waking everybody up, I guess really is what we were doing and having them star— and then I was um specifically, texting any of my dam owners that I had their numbers in my phone. So any of my bigger owners I tend to have the— now I have all of them. At the time, I had only the dam owners that had multiple dams or very large structures in my phone…
[Both laugh].
KB: So I was texting them to check in with them and see how their dams were performing and what they were seeing. Um, so that went on through the airport, all the way to boarding, and then we, um switched planes in New Jersey. And so then we stopped there, and we were in the New Jersey airport. We started seeing um, the Today Show all the news channels had you know, signs that were saying dams had failed and showing flooding and then we were talking to the dam owners and to the dam safety engineers that were here and they were saying, “No they haven’t
4 failed. Their overtopping, or they’re spilling.” But, the news being reported out was that they were failing. So—
NG: Is it hard to dispel that misinformation circulating?
KB: Yeah, the misinformation for rampant, um, and extremely frustrating. I don’t, um, I don’t think I was anticipating the amount, one of the public’s, um, and the ne— and the media’s attention and how much time and effort that was gonna take for us. Like we had always run through scenarios of a dam failure and what would you do and how would you respond. I don’t think we had factored in that there was gonna be this media and then just public people, all our numbers are on the website, and how many people were calling us to ask us about some dam that they lived below or— I mean I got calls from people in Philadelphia or Atlanta whose daughter lived below the dam and wanted to know, you know, if it was safe. And so it was, um I don’t think anyone really anticipated that. I sure didn’t.
NG: Absolutely. Um, I know in my interview with Bill he mentioned that there’s um, 200
something dams that you guys were monitoring throughout the event. Could you maybe speak to some of the dams that you, yourself were directly involved in responding to? Um, and what efforts you took to make sure there wasn’t dam failure?
KB: So we got reports that, or I got a report that, Barnes Meadow, which is the large dam up the Poudre Canyon um, up at the top was, was failing and had water on it. And the report came in
from C-DOT,2 so we felt like it was a more reliable account. The problem is, is that the Poudre
Canyon, Highway 14 was closed, so we couldn’t get up it. So I was able to call the dam owner, who has um, caretakers that are up there. They didn’t happen to be up there, but he was able to work his way up there and get up there. And as it turned out, it was only spilling, and then there was water on the downstream slope, but it appeared more like it was just from the amount of rain they had had, rather than a um… actual dam seeping or leaking. And that I say was pretty typical of what we responded to. It was a lot of calls of dams failing and then going out and seeing ‘em and they were actually functioning like they were supposed to be. Um, we had identified two hundr— we had taken the rainfall data and identified 200 dams that had to be, um, inspected or confirmed, um… were in condition. Just based… if they had received more water than what their designed for or more rain. Um and then any of our dams that are on our restricted list, which means for various reasons they had, um, had something that needed repair then we inspected any of those that were in that rainfall area that maybe were still below the threshold for what their spillway was designed, but because of their restriction were considered higher risk.
[Man’s voice in background].
NG: Interesting and to what extent do you think you were directly prepared to respond, um, to the challenges of inspecting 200 dams at short notice?
2 Colorado Department of Transportation.
5 KB: Um, well since I had just started — I mean I had, you know been on the job less than a year. NG: Mm-hmm.
KB: The way our inspection cycle works on dams we inspect our high hazards every year and our significant every other year. And then our low hazards every six years. So, I hadn’t even seen all of my dams yet, and so some of them it was my first visit to go see them. So in that respect I don’t know that I was well prepared [laughs]. I mean it’s the same rathe— you know regardless of what the dam is, but as far as… typically before an inspection I would do um, a file-review and go through the case history on the dam and know what was typical and what wasn’t and how they function, and that just wasn’t… wasn’t an option during the event.
NG: Mm-hmm.
KB: So I had, had some FEMA emergency management training, but it was literally like an online ah webinar. [Laughs]. So I don’t, you know with a whole lot of initials, and so then we I got the call to actually report to um…
[Man’s voice in background].
KB: …the incident command center, I was like I don’t even know what is, like you know. So, that was ah, pretty interesting.
NG: Awesome, um. To what extent did your office or agency find itself involved in
unprecedented interaction with other agencies um, also respond responding to the flood and flood management?
KB: I think our agency was pretty heavily, um, I guess, pushed forward. There was a lot of concern for dam safety both from the emergency managers and from the public. Um, and a lot of people in the state I think, just don’t understand how water works here. So there were even questions of well were flooding, why aren’t these reservoirs filling? And they’re not flood control reservoirs, or they’re not even on the river. We have a lot of reservoirs that are filled by ditches, so the rain doesn’t necessarily affect their water level. Um, and our office was… I mean we were getting calls from the governor to find out the state of our dams, and I don’t know if that’s ever been, and we’ve definitely never tried to inspect 200 dams in, you know, two or three weeks.
[Both laugh]. KB: So…
NG: Fair enough. Um, you know you mentioned you have a background in floodplain
management. Did that come into play at all during the event in how you looked at and evaluated kind of things as they were going on?
6 KB: Yea, I think I had um, maybe a little better understanding of FEMA… a little better I would say. But, just understanding. And then FEMA works on a hundred year is— the hundred year flood is their main flood and so, and what their limits are. But, I think some of the… for sure the hydraulics or the understanding of where the water’s gonna flow or if it’s raining heavy here how long before that peak gets to this location or that location. Um, and then definitely some of the interagencies and different— I mean we were suddenly sitting in the emergency operations center. And like I said, previous to that our… involvement of a branch in the emergency aspect of it had been pretty minimum. I mean we prepare emergency action plans, but their paper documents and we work with the owners, but we hand’t really— we had just — I mean, fort— fortuitously, so we had just started reaching out to the um, state and local emergency managers and trying to build some relationships there.
NG: Awesome. What would you say was one of the biggest challenges you encountered throughout the process?
KB: I think there um, how long it was gonna last. Um, the first few days we were just workin’, I don’t know twenty hours. I mean we were just working insane— I got off the plane from Rhode Island and drove straight to the office… um, and it was like four days before I even got my suitcase out of the car. Not to mention, um and it just went on and on. I mean the rain continued, and that was crazy, but just the calls and concerns we were getting. Um… and then the fact that there were only twelve of us, and that’s through the whole state. So, half of ‘em are on the west slope and weren’t even here and then the um… the road closures I would say were a maj— I mean… in most of our scenarios we look at one dam failing, and so then to be receiving calls. Every day we were getting four or five, and so our normal protocol would have been to drive out to see ‘em, but the roads were closed. You couldn’t get out to see ‘em. And ah, access was so limited that we had to rely a lot more on calling… the owner who was there or someone who was there. I mean it got to the point where we were calling just other professionals that we knew in the industry that were near— that lived near the dam to say, “can you go out to the dam and take a look at this? And send me pictures or call me, let me know.”
NG: Did they do a good job?
KB: They did. You know, it was pretty amazing to see the engineering community um, pull together and really… I mean we had lots of people callin’ to say they would— I mean that’s how the whole volunteer thing got started was just from the sheer number of people that were
volunteering to help. And then as the incident dragged on, I think we recognized there was no way were gonna be able to physically handle the amount of work that needed to be accomplished in the amount of time that it needed to be done.
NG: Did you head one of those teams that um, oversaw the volunteer engineers?
KB: Yeah, so all twelve— of the— all the dam safety engineers were given um, I don’t even know what the number was, ten or twelve dams that we oversaw. And so, we had to— The hard
7 part for those of us for whose area was hit was that we had to be the ones to get together all the files to send to the volunteers so that they at least had at a minimum the last inspection that was done and then, ah, a drawing and a location of where the dam was, and then also we had to send out letters to all the owners letting them know that, ah, a private consultant was gonna be coming to perform the inspection and that this was a one-time thing and just all the liability and for both… the consultant, the owner and for the state. So that was pretty—
NG: Did you encounter any resistance from dam owners to private consultants coming out? KB: Mm-hmm. Yeah we had quite a few… ah, not quite a few but we had some for sure. And we ended up, I know I ended up doing three or four inspections where the owner was just not willing to um… let them on their property or made it so difficult to schedule that it was just like never mind I’ll just come do it. Um… also with the understanding that I have to continue to work with them, so it doesn’t really do me any good to make them really mad. [Laughs].
NG: Yeah, fair enough. Did any dams fail in Larimer County or within your, um, watershed that your—?
KB: Yeah, I had one dam that failed. Um, I don’t know if you would fai— it drained the outlet. Just exceeded its capacity and ended up draining out. It’s not a jurisdictional dam, which means it’s not a dam I regularly inspect or that we… um, monitor. And so, it was only found after the fact, so I don’t know when it failed or how it failed. Um, and then I did have um, Watson Lake, which is a fish hatchery on the Poudre was completely inundated. So, I actually have pictures where you can’t see the reservoir because it’s underwater, like the entire upstream, downstream. I mean it’s right next to the Poudre, and the Poudre came out of the banks upstream of the, um, the dam and then just completely inundated, so it washed into and out of the reservoir, but at time— we thought it had been um, completely just obliterated. And then after the water finally receded it actually had not. The inlet was completely destroyed where it came in and the outlets sustained some damage in the downstream slope, but it was still there.
NG: Awesome, um. Um, what was one um success and one failure you encounter during responding to the flood and maybe afterwards?
KB: Um, I think we did a pretty good job of getting the information to the people that needed it.
So, pretty early on we started making maps and saying— um, in GIS3— and saying “Here’s the
dams that have been reported, here’s the dams that we have checked or confirmed,” and then pushing that information out daily to everyone to say. And also, to say here are the dams that— whose spillways are functioning because there was a lot of misconception of um, the spillway and the dam overtopping, the difference on that. So I think we did a really good job on that.
3 Geographic Information Systems.
8 Um, for the biggest failure, during the event, I think a lot of, um, I think that a lot of extra work was put on Bill McCormick, who’s the chief of the dam safety branch, um because he was trying to manage all twelve of us and then respond to all the media and the governor’s office and there was just this whole slew of people that wanted information, and so his workload was just extreme, and I don’t think we um, we hadn’t divided up the tasks very well. And then for our group in particular, I think we should have brought over the other dam safety engineers over from the West Slope sooner. Um, I’m not sure I understand all the reasons why it took so long for us to decide that they should come over.
NG: Interesting. Is there any um kind of programs or educational outreach you guys are doing now, um, you know with hindsight of the event behind you?
KB: Yeah, we’ve actually started doing some emergency action workshops, like regional workshops, so we’ve held two and we have two more scheduled where we actually get in the room with the emergency managers with the state, the county, and the cities. And we run through a scenario of the dam that’s gonna fail. Also, the floodplain managers, I think we saw that as ah, um, when a dam fails, while its not flooding, the results and the response needed by the
emergency community is very similar to a flooding event, and so we saw that disconnect between the floodplain managers and the emergency managers. And so we’ve been trying to bridge that gap.
NG: Awesome. Um, have you shifted or altered, um, any of your management philosophies or kind of those principals after the event? Has it changed any of your…?
KB: I guess the biggest, ah, philosophical change is just been, I think, I mean I had never seen a dam fail or experience that first hand, um, and so it had sorta gotten to be like I don’t think it would ever really happen. Um, and all large dams were fine, and so it was really the small dams that were overtaken by the storm. And so, I think for me it kind of, ah, forced me to look a little more closely at those little dams because they tend to be smaller owners, less well maintained. Um, the risk is lower, but it doesn’t mean there’s not a risk.
NG: Fair enough. Um, and then what do you think were the most important lessons learned from 2013 flood with regard to preparation, planning, management, and recovery from water
disasters? It’s a loaded question, I know. [Both laugh].
KB: That’s all one question? Um, I think that the, probably the biggest lesson learned was just the need for all the different entities to be talking, but more than that, to have more defined roles of how their gonna respond. Um, and as far as preparation, I think that the, ah, exercises and me— like making sure that those, for us that our emergency action plans are exercised and people understand ‘em. I mean I literally had someone call and be like, “Okay, we need to activate to a level one and I don’t know what that means.” Like, you know? And I would have
9 said it was one of my more prepared and more um, advanced owners, so the fact that they
weren’t sure because it is a really rare event. And so I— I think that, um as far as preparation and planning. Um, as far as management, I think for the dam safety branch in specific, we’ve
committed to, we haven’t completed it yet, but we’ve committed to coming up with a, um, job descriptions for during an emergency like that. So whose gonna be in charge of the media and whose gonna be in charge of pushing the data out and who’s in charge of getting the weather data, because as the storm went on we were still trying to collect that rain dana— rain data, and it was changing. You know, Saturday we all went out and did— I think I did sixteen inspections on Saturday, thinking we were past it and then Sunday it started raining again. And so really all the inspections I had done on Saturday were, um, I mean it gave us a point to say on Saturday they were okay, but it wasn’t really sufficient to say that after that additional rain there hadn’t been damage. And then as far as the recovery, I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is just that it is a
very slow process.
[Both laugh].
KB: And it— I think, I would say all of us kind of learn— I mean it was, you were in the disaster and you were just pushing through on adrenaline and then it just kept dragging on and on and on and then it was like months later and your still— I mean to this— you know, I guess it’s not quite a year, but nine months after the event and my workload is has still altered by the flood. As far as were still, you know there’s— now there’s all sorts of people that are trying to do repair work and reconstruction and um, and there’s a lot more pressure from higher ups to look a little more closely at some of ‘em.
NG: Um, when they’re undertaking repairs or reconstructing after the flood do you guys oversee certain standards that they have to meet or—?
KB: Mm-hmm, yeah. So all the repair and the reconstruction has to go through our office and be reviewed. So that’s been um, a pretty significant increase in the projects that we’ve seen coming in. And then the timeframe um… this winter and this— there were a lot of repairs that were scheduled and then the river didn’t go down or, you know, they were tied up trying to get
funding. And then also some of the repairs that were— that did receive FEMA money have to be completed within a certain amount of time, which means we have to get ‘em reviewed in a certain amount of time. So…
NG: More work for you. KB: Mm-hmm.
[Both laugh].
NG: Um, and then you were mentioning um, the amount of rainfall totals, were you guys looking at real-time data or was it you know, a little bit delayed?
10
KB: We got, pretty fortunately, we had a pretty good relationship with um, AWA4, which is a
metrological company here in town and so we were getting the data pretty fast. Um… we were tied in to there, so they would be able to give us rainfall data um, that they had on grids and on systems, and then you know, the more the delay the more fine-tuned the data was, but we were getting rough data pretty… pretty fast.
[Man’s voice talking on the phone in the background].
NG: Awesome, um. Sorry. Do you have— This is the weird question. Do you have a favorite memory or does anything stand out in particular, in relationship to the event?
KB: Ah, we went up in a helicopter, um to go survey one of the dams that had failed. And um, I think just seeing the people that were left there, and we had taken up… um, we took up some water and they had for ah, cat food and just some random…
[Laughs].
KB: …things. And we had gotten in our office. We sent an email out and said, “Hey if anyone’s has time could you bake some cookies, because these people are stranded up there.” And so, um… just tak— and hearing their stories, I think, of actually living through it and how they felt. And actually get to um, I guess in professional light, getting to actually survey a real-life dam failure. I mean, dams don’t really fail that often, so to actually get to take some numbers and calculate, you know. And then they had some really good video of the failure, where people had watched it and to see that failure to develop and how long it took and how it, um, how it
occurred. It was pretty interesting.
NG: What time was that, where was it located?
KB: That was up on Meadows Lake. So that was up near Estes Park. NG: Awesome. Were you yourself personally affected by the flood?
KB: Ah, yes. So I was in Rhode Island; my husband was home. I have two daughters that are five and eight, and so, school was released early, and so he was… picking up kids and trying to figure that out, and then I just wasn’t home for like two weeks. So that was really hard,
personally. I had been out of town. And then I was home, but I wasn’t really home. I was coming home and the girls were already in bed, and I was leaving before they were even awake, and so, um, and, and I know John Batka, who works in the Greeley office as well, like we even talked like, it would’ve been better if we had been out of town. Because it was almost harder on our families that we were here, but we weren’t um, available. So that, I mean it’s not… my house was still there, and we were all safe, but it was still impacted, and then like I said the girls were out of school for a few days. And then, the second week, so I got home, and then my husband
11 went out of town for work. So I was a single parent and working a million hours. So, it actually ended up that my sister is a school teacher in Longmont, and their school was closed as well. So, she actually came and actually ended up staying at my house. But there were a few days where I was coordinating for a sitter to watch my girls for two hours, and then my sister was gonna be there, and then my parents were outta town— so I had neighbors that were coming over. And it was— I guess I had never envisioned that when something like this happened in my professional life that I was also going to be dealing with my home life at the same time.
NG: Absolutely. Very interesting. Um… is there um, anything that we’ve already talked about that you wanna return to and maybe add more to? Or clarify?
KB: Oh, I don’t know if I remember enough of what we… [Both laugh].
KB: Of what I said. I guess I would just go back to as an engineer and someone who has trained in that, the um, the media was such a big, um, unknown and such a time sink for us. We were fielding calls from reporters, and we had a couple come go oh ah, inspections with us. And they interviewed us and that was really scary. I’d never had training in interviewing and then to see yourself on TV. And then we had like ah, news reporter come, and so that’s kinda— you know you’re saying stuff and someone’s writing something down. Um, and there was just a real lack of knowledge, I guess, in that area.
NG: Mm-hmm, to add an extra layer of stress.
KB: To add an extra layer of stress, when you’re like, “But I’m working forty hours a week. I don’t really want to be on TV.”
[Both laugh].
NG: Fair enough. Um, and then is there anything else you’d like to talk about that I haven’t already asked you about?
KB: [Pauses to think]. I don’t think so. I don’t know what else. I mean I will say that going to the incident command center, once they got it set up out at the Ranch, was pretty fascinating to see how that um— I mean FEMA gets a lot of bad publicity, but when they came in it was a well-oiled machine. I mean they had, you know the room where people were getting the helicopters sent out, and they had the briefings, and they had the recovery team set up. And we were um, technical advisors so we had a table, and we were responsible for reporting in and just watching. You know, and then they had— there was a whole tent city set up out there with all the different crews that came in. And then they had brought in a lot of the firefighters and the hotshot teams to come in to fly a lot of the helicopters. And so, just seeing all— you know, and they’d coming from all over the country and setting up. And then like you would go into the incident command center and there was like “showers are this way and laundry is this way and lunch is this way.”
12 And it was like a whole campus that just came to life, which I had never experienced before. So that was pretty… fascinating.
NG: And where was the Ranch?
KB: It’s the Larimer County fairgrounds. NG: Ohh, ok. Thank you.
[Both laugh].
KB: In Loveland, right off 34. Sorry.
NG: No worries, I had one more question for you that popped into when you were saying that, it’s escaped me. [Both laugh]. So, I guess thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Is there anything else you’d like to add or—?
KB: I don’t think so. NG: All right, awesome.
