NOTE: The interviewer s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets.

Transcription

1 Sharon Cole. Born TRANSCRIPT of OH 1962V This interview was recorded on May 28, The interviewer is Martha Dick. The interview also is available in video format, filmed by Donald Dick. The interview was transcribed by Susan Becker. ABSTRACT: Sharon Cole, who lost one home to the Fourmile Fire in 2010 and then experienced major damage to another house in Fourmile Canyon in which she lived at the time of the Flood of 2013, gives an eyewitness account of the flood s effect on houses, roads, bridges, and creek beds during those September days in She tells of moving within the canyon for safety, of eventual evacuations and returning to survey damages and rebuild, and of the large role played by friends and even neighbors who previously did not know each other but were drawn together as a community by disaster. NOTE: The interviewer s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets. [A]. 00:00 (Today is May 28, My name is Martha Dick, and I'm interviewing Sherry Cole, who was involved in the Fourmile Creek flood beginning September 11, This interview is being recorded for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program, and the interview is being filmed by Don Dick. Sherry, you have a lot of story to tell. Can you start off and tell us just some basics like where and when you were born?) I was born in Pennsylvania, a small, small town Mountaindale, Pennsylvania, in Home births were more common then. All the kids in my grandma's family were born at home, and I was too. My husband and I moved to Boulder in January 1974, to the house that we lived in for the next 40 or so years. Unusual in Boulder for people to live in the same house, but we bought it in Fourmile Canyon. It wasn't in great shape. It was undoubtedly built by drunken miners, according to one of our neighbors. It certainly wasn't a very straight house. It was crooked. [chuckles] And the door shut automatically, because the wall was off by at least four inches from floor to ceiling. But anyway, we loved that house and improved it a lot, but not as much as it really needed to be improved. In any case, the year after we moved here, we got a nice deal on another house, which was equally crooked, about a mile up the road, and that was our rental property for quite a long time. During the Fourmile Fire, we stayed with friends in town, and one of our friends was a fire department fellow, and he let us know the next day that our house was one of the ones that burned. So oddly enough, the rental property did not burn. They were 1

2 both equally, what you'd say, all made out of wood and essentially firetraps, but fortunately there were people with appropriate fire gear and lots of water, and the rental house was preserved, saved, whatever. I guess that's just the luck of the draw. But for me, it was really a good thing, because I did move back to my home area in Fourmile last July. The Fourmile Fire was Labor Day And through our insurance, we found a rental place in Lyons, and liked the town, and liked the people, and liked the area. Our realtor took us all over the place to try to find another spot to buy, so we did. We purchased a home in Lyons, outside of the town, after the Fourmile Fire. It was the end of April in We loved it there. It was very nice. But after my husband died, I did want to get back to my old neighborhood in Fourmile. And it occurred to my massage therapist, not me, that it would be sensible to live in my rental house and only be a mile away from my old property that I do intend to build on. I even have a building permit. That's all I have so far, but anyway. 04:54 So I moved back to the rental place, because my tenant, conveniently enough, moved back to Florida, and so it was empty. It needed work, but it needed work from the time we bought it, and so there was always something to do there that needed to be done. Anyway, so I moved back July 3 of July 3. And was working on fixing it up so that the innards of the house would be more livable, and various repairs needed to be done. Unfortunately, in retrospect, I didn't focus too much on the outside part of the house, but I didn't. That's the way it goes. On the night of September 11, when I was on my way we had had a very wet summer. Lots of people mentioned that their gardens had never been better. You didn't have to water, because nature was doing it for you. It seemed like it rained almost every few days. But the week before the flood, it really rained I think every day. It was just soggy. And even so, living in a semi-arid climate since 1974, I really didn't I always had fires on my mind more than floods. Of course, in Fourmile after the fire, everybody was very concerned about the possibility of flooding in the damaged area, with good reason. I mean, you always saw on the news from Colorado Springs and various places that when the ground isn't stable because things have burned down, you know that that can be pretty risky for floods. Well, be that as it may, I wasn't really thinking about it too much even though my cabin, the rental property, is at the bottom of a burned out area. It's amazing it didn't burn itself, but it didn't. That evening, my dog and I were coming home, and I went by Community Hospital through what seemed like a two-foot puddle of water, and I thought, Holy mackerel! That is really sloshy. The storm drains must be having a really hard time. It still didn't really dawn on me what was about to come. I was thinking, This is really bad down here. And then I went home, and it was raining, probably, at the time it must 2

3 have been raining, because I think I read later that I it rained I don't remember which was the one that which day it rained what we usually get in a whole year in a twentyfour hour period but it was definitely raining very, very hard. And so, when I got home, I didn't notice that the creek in front of my house was all that much higher. It was louder. But I live this rental property is close to the road. It doesn't have much of a yard. And on the other side of the road, is where the creek is, and it's usually, oh, maybe, four feet below the road. At that point, nothing had really changed that much with the flow, at least not right there. But that evening, two of my friends one from Nederland and one from Erie were calling me and saying you really ought to move to higher ground, because you're close to the creek, and you're on the bottom of a potentially hill-slide situation. I just really didn't believe it. I thought, Nah, nah; it'll be okay. When did I leave? I did leave that night, later. I don't remember getting the alert from the county until was already up at my friend's house, which is about five miles further up the road in Sunset. I have a couple of friends up there. 10:13 Janet, the person I stayed with, lives on a hill at the very end of Sunset actually, there's another house or two in process above her but in any case, she and her husband put in solar power several years back. I think it was in the '80s. So she was a good choice, because she was off the grid already. Of course, we did still have power at that point. But anyway, I got myself and my dog and basically I didn't even take any dog food; I just left. Put the dog in the car and cleaned out my refrigerator somewhat because I thought, well, we'll need stuff to eat, depending on how long I'm there. When I got to Janet's house, I thought, well, I don't think I have dog food. And so, anyway, that evening, we heard the I guess it's the reverse-911 call, or whatever they call it, that is the flood warning. And they said: Move to higher ground! And it was very official sounding. Janet and I were already cozied up in the bed, and we said, Well, we got that taken care of. She was never worried about flooding in her house, because she said as high up on Fourmile Creek as she is and as high up the hill above it, if her place flooded, Boulder would be history. So she was pretty casual not casual, exactly, but she was pretty comfortable. And I was comfortable too. So, all night well not all night, because I sleep very soundly once I'm cozy, nothing wakes me up. But I did hear the boulders rolling down the creek like I'm sure everybody else did, and it was so loud I thought it was thunder. Well, of course, it was still raining, some of it could have been thunder. But the next morning it was still soggy, very soggy, and I think it was yeah, it must have been still raining. That Thursday was my mother's birthday, and I was going to call her, but I decided I'd better go back to my house and get some dog food and get some 3

4 more clothes and some other stuff to be camped up there for a few days is what I thought. Well, on my way back to my house this is four or I guess it's about five miles from Sunset to where my place is you could certainly see all kinds of rivulets down the mountain, coming down, the river was a lot higher. Little areas that never used to be streams were rolling across the road with lots of water, and at my friend Pat's house she lives about a half a mile or so west of where I live and the creek was beginning to come across the road not the regular Fourmile Creek but I guess they call it Potato Gulch right next to where she lives. I don't think at that point in time because this would have been like Um, I think I have my dates wrong, because when I came back it was actually Friday, the 13th. I must have not gone up there until Thursday. That's a blur to me. Because I thought I went up Wednesday, the worst night. But I know the electricity was still on when I came back on Friday, the 13th, because that was when the water was pouring in through the back of my house, and so it wasn't from the river Fourmile Creek rising and coming across the road to my house, it was pouring in the back from the hillside being all soggy and it was a really big puddle behind my house. 15:03 I took pictures of it, and I called up my insurance agent [chuckles]. I think that was my first call. I said, "What should I do? Should I take pictures?" Because at the time I was thinking that because I still had electricity I should start vacuuming it up, because I have a big wet-vac, and I'm thinking do I really I have good rubber boots, right? I'm thinking do I really want to plug in the electric vacuum cleaner? Maybe that wouldn't be such a smart idea. And then I decided it would be fruitless, because all this water was pouring in, even if I had a giant bucket and a giant vacuum cleaner, I wasn't going to be able to make that big of a dent. So I thought, I have other priorities here. I'd better get my dog food and clean up this and that. And then I called oh, that was the day I was supposed to meet with my builder, because I had gotten my permit, my building permit to rebuild the house that burned. I had gotten that permit at the end of August. So this is like about a week later, the builder had arranged to meet me there. Well, obviously, nobody was going to meet anybody in Fourmile Canyon [laughs]. And I didn't think I needed to call him, so maybe I I don't remember actually if I did call him that day or not. But Bill and Janet both called me and said, "They are predicting that it's going to rain a whole bunch more, and if you are going to come up here, you'd better come up here pretty soon." So in the late afternoon, after sloshing around my house, doing whatever I didn't accomplish very much, that's for sure on Friday the 13th, I went up in time to be able to still drive from my house to Sunset. And the reason that's important is because in the 4

5 meantime that little creek by my friend Pat's house, which half of the time is not even a trickle, had turned into this raging torrent and had carved a big chasm in the road, and you couldn't drive over it. Not even with a little ATV. People tried afterwards. You could hike over it after a few days when the water came down, but it was pretty hairy for Pat; her sister, who was visiting from California; and her next-door-neighbor, Gail; and I'm not sure who else. But fortunately for them, some people who live they still are there, in one of the houses, between my place and Sunset are climbers, rock climbers. They have all kinds of gear: carabiners and lots of good ropes and a sling or two like portable ladders. It's good equipment. They used it to shore up their propane tank. Because in the meantime, the propane tank the bank on which the tank was, was being dissolved out from under it. Basically, it was slipping. They put a bunch of ropes and carabiners and whatever they needed to and shored it up with big rocks. Anyway, they managed to let's see, they managed to get it safe, so it was staying put. And it was so interesting at the time, because half of the people that were my neighbors I didn't even know. I know them to wave to and say hi, but I didn't even remember their names. They have two little girls, really cute kids, and they were very helpful. And they did rescue Pat and her whole entourage, including her bird. She didn't have any cats or dogs, but she has a macaw. I forget his name, too. But he's been one of her she really likes birds, and she's had a few over the years. But he's been her buddy for a long time. He got to ride in the helicopter. 20:45 When they they had set up the ladder wrapped with rope around a couple of trees and rocks over that chasm where the river had come down that gulch that never had been a river before. Although Pat was always concerned about it, and she had a bunch of sandbags, and she was just hoping it would hold. Well it would have, but like a lot of other things that you don't plan on, some trees and some rocks and some debris blocked it off up where it was. Then it just kind of veered into the edge of her house underneath her house. And it really looked like her house might cave in into the creek. It's hard to imagine, because even the next day, I think it was the next day it was either Saturday or Sunday Saturday Bill Jones, one of the neighbors in Sunset who's lived there quite a long time, he and I walked down to my place, and we could get as far as Pat's driveway, which was now a river, a chasm you didn't want to jump over it or wade through it. The water was too too intense. In fact, actually the walk on the way down was pretty intense. And part of the road had been eaten away, and you could see the railroad tracks that used to go up there, and then ended in well, it didn't end, it T-ed in Sunset part goes up to Gold Hill and the other part goes up to Sugarloaf. You could see railroad tracks in other places too. (When would those tracks have been laid and used?) 5

6 I think in the late 1800s, soon after they did have, um, oh, not like tourist tours exactly I'm sure the miners used them. But I think people actually did ride up there and ride all the way up to the picnic grounds on Mount Alto, because that it was it IS a very pretty road, a pretty drive, and in fact, the Switzerland Trail, that's what it's called on both sides, I think, the Mount Alto Road that goes to Gold Hill and then over to Ward, well, after Fourmile was cut in at least two places, Salina was basically washed out. People have seen those pictures. Pretty amazing, the damage. But Wallstreet was cut off too. There were like little islands. And so we knew what was going on in Sunset, and we knew sort of what was going on in other places in the canyon, because two of the people who live in Sunset have generators. And then, of course, Janet was off the grid anyway, but she doesn't have a TV. We would all gather together at either well mostly at Hal Crutchfield's house Hal and Alison sort of the selfdesignated rescue people [chuckles]. They are the ones who drove out the first day that it was sunny, which I think was Saturday morning. That was the day that Bill and I took our walk down to Pat s and to see if we could get to my house. 25:14 But by the time we got to Pat's and saw how bad it was, even though it was only another half a mile, and I sort of wanted to check it out, but I sort of didn't. And Bill hadn't had breakfast. And it was way after lunch by then. And I thought, well, it's silly for him he's a Boy Scout leader, he knows he should eat but he didn't [laughs]. So we teased him big-time about not being prepared. But we walked on back. And we were just blown away by the everybody says this, but it's so true the water I mean, Fourmile Creek is just a small creek. It's not as small as that raging current that was right next to Pat's house, normally. But to see how far it could go and how deep it was cutting different places. In the meantime, of course, the bridge, which is just a little ways east of my house to the property that is on the other side, that bridge had totally collapsed and twisted, because major trees and rocks had banged up against it for such a long time that the bottom of it was eroded and twisted these concrete structures that looked like they would last indefinitely. It's amazing, how powerful Mother Nature is. And anytime I ever flew in to New York City, and I would look down at those bridges and see all the lights, and it looked just like a spider web fragile. It's just amazing, the power of Mother Nature when she's going to unload. We've all seen the pictures of tornadoes or fires or floods. Seen them from up above and from down below. But, anyway [pause] Yeah, Friday was the day that I walked through the house and all the rugs were squishy and the water was running right out the door like the movie A River Runs Through It. and I'm thinking, Oy-oy-oy-oy-oy; what a mess this is going to be. Well, in many ways I was 6

7 lucky, because it wasn't dirty water, it was just water-water. So I didn't have mud damage or any kind of sewage damage like lots of people did. I just had water. And of course when rugs are wet for long periods of time when I came back Saturday it wasn't that squishy, it wasn't flowing anymore. All the rugs were wet, so Janet and I pulled them all out and corralled a couple of bikers that came by [laughs] to help us to lift the rugs. And conveniently enough, I had a kennel for my dog, and that made a good place to lay the rugs. Not that we really wanted them to dry and reuse them, we just wanted to get them away from the house, and they were really heavy. So the house dried itself out pretty well, but there was mold, and I did have to have a lot of work done on that to get rid of the mold, and anything that was porous material had to get thrown out. It was interesting, because well, I did have flood insurance. I wasn't going to renew it, but I decided that it would be really unpleasant if anything should happen. The house isn't worth much, but it's not worth zero. So I thought I'd better just pay the money. I talked to my insurance agent, because the price that I got from the we started getting flood insurance right after the fire. The price was around $360 a year. When I got the bill for last year it was $3,000-something. And I thought, This was just ridiculous. But I was almost going to do it, but I thought to ask Cathy what she thought, and she found me a better deal. Not for the company, I guess, but a better deal for me. So it wound up to be only 400 and some dollars. And boy, was I ever glad I had it. 30:22 So I called the insurance fellow for that that's completely different from your home insurance as everybody probably knows by now. This fellow was from Georgia. He was a young guy, and he had last been in Colorado when he was eight years old. He was thrilled to come to Colorado. We tried to call each other, but the phones were out, the electricity was out. I was only back to town for the first time, I guess it was Tuesday, and we couldn't get in touch with each other. But then we finally did, and he was leaving the next day. And he was very anxious to come up and take measurements and take pictures and do the insurance thing. And I said, "Well, we can do it, but the problem is we have to go over the Switzerland Trail. It'll take about an hour. It's an old railroad grade. It's not the best road in the best of circumstances. Then we go down through Gold Hill, down Sunshine Canyon, and I can meet you in Boulder, and I'll drive you back up, because they are trying to limit traffic." And he was fine with that. "That's fine." I said, "You have to have old shoes, because we'll have to we can drive to about a half a mile or a mile from my house. Then we have to go down a ladder, across the creek the new creek, which is the road [or] the road, which is the creek whatever!" "Oh, that's fine. I'm okay with that." 7

8 [laughs] When I told the same story to the FEMA guy about a week later, he said, "We'll just call it unreachable, and we'll call you in another week or so and see how we're doing." But all the way up there, he's taking pictures of how beautiful it was except for the dead trees from the fire. He thought it was just absolutely gorgeous. And every now and then he'd say, "I mean, I'm sorry you got flooded out and all that, but this is really cool!" [laughs] So it was really kind of funny, but he did a great job as far as making a drawing of my house, measurements of everything, what got damaged, what would need repair, and did it all the way they know how to do it. It was very helpful. I now have a good drawing of my house, which I never did, because mine was sort of sketchy. But anyway, let's see traffic the first day that you could potentially drive up over Switzerland Trail and see because you couldn't go up towards Sugarloaf because the creek had messed up the culverts were all damaged. You couldn't go that way unless you were walking. Although somebody did come down the Sugarloaf Road in the middle of the night either Saturday or Sunday in a pickup. I did hear about that. I'm not sure exactly how they managed it, but they did. But going up through Gold Hill, it was like bumper-to-bumper practically because it wasn't so bad on Switzerland Trail. I think I only I think there was only one time when I got somebody coming up while I was going down, and I had to back up a little for a little ways but there was traffic from Nederland and traffic from Ward, I guess. All sorts of people were taking the road that leads through Gold Hill down Sunshine Canyon. And so it was a pretty good road in terms of ability to get through, but for all the people who normally don't have much traffic on that road, it was really quite an ordeal for some time. I really appreciated the school kids. They had drawn all kinds of pictures and stuff around the Gold Hill School. But the best thing was: "Welcome to our town. Please slow down." [chuckles] Because people did, when they could, go as fast as was reasonable. That's what everybody does. But you had to be pretty cautious. And I am so grateful that there weren't any significant or severe accidents that I'm aware of, because there could have been with all the different trucks and all the different rescue vehicles and fire department 35:41 Oh, on Saturday, before the neighbor Pat and her bird and her entourage got rescued, we cleared a helicopter space, because some other people were being picked up or actually, I think that was Sunday, because she knew that we had shared pictures and shared stories, and I saw pictures of her and her friends walking over that ladder with all that water underneath. It wasn't that far down, but it would have seemed like it was that far 8

9 down. It was at least 10 feet, and all this water. They did use belays; they had ropes on them just in case. But nobody fell in, nobody was injured. It was a pretty amazing thing. The people in the National Guard that landed the helicopter and we were all ga-ga, taking pictures it's not every day you see one of those in Fourmile! but they sure did what they needed to do. The first day the rest of us those of us who had vehicles were really interested in keeping them at hand, if possible. For Pat, she had a vehicle, but it couldn't get across the chasm, and going down canyon, not just Wallstreet was isolated, but Salina too. You couldn't have there was no way to drive. So she, fortunately, had friends and family in town. Most people did. It's truly amazing what people are able to do during a tragedy, an emergency, a natural disaster, whatever unnatural disaster! because, you know, the power is out, all the stuff in your freezer is going to be no good in a few days, so people were leaving large amounts of food I know lots of people said that they felt in lots of ways it was like a feast at a party, because why not? You had to use it up or throw it out, leave it for the bears, whatever. So lots of freezers and refrigerators got cleaned out, and people who had to leave left many supplies to the people who were staying. Let's see, in the meantime Janet, who doesn't stay there all winter she usually closes up her place and goes and spends the winter months with friends in either Arizona or Florida, or someplace friends and family. So she was planning on leaving, probably October. But her exit got moved up a little since there was no real reason to be coming back. She had to go to a nephew's wedding and was going to take her daughter. So I knew I needed to find another place to stay, because I wasn't going to be able to stay in my cabin until it got all dried out and destroyed all of the mold stuff. Actually, at that point I didn't know how much there was. Fortunately, I had really good friends, Evelyn and Dick Armstrong, who live on Norwood since they had that place built in the '60s. Although some of their neighbors had flood damage, and quite a few people in the North Broadway-Upland-Violet to 19th Street area a lot of damage there with mud I stayed with them from I think it was around the 28th of September when Janet was leaving. Fortunately for me, they like me and my dogs, so we stayed there. 40:43 I really thought it would only be a few months, but what with one thing and another, I only moved back to my Fourmile house at the end of March. And I wasn't fully moved in yet then, so it was probably more like April, because so many different things had to be fixed. Well, before they could be fixed, they had to be moved out, and so my house was gutted down to the 2 x 4s most places where there were 2 x 4s. This is an old mountain cabin we're talking about here. The people who took care of the removal process and the dehumidifier that was such a strange thing, to have a dehumidifier in Colorado [laughs] three of them in my 9

10 house! to dry everything out and get rid of the mold, and then they put down the appropriate stuff before it got rebuilt. We were surprised, because I guess when you live in the mountains, you get used to being fairly independent, and you like that, but then again at the same time, it's a very heartwarming sight to see some county road equipment coming up to re-build your road, which is now the river, because the bridge, as bridges often do, turned into a dam the bridge that was across the road from my house. And the river went because water goes wherever water can and it turned almost a right turn in front of the bridge or west of the bridge and went right into the road bed. So for a while because it cut down into the road bed and where my property had been roughly two feet or so above the road two feet, two-and-a-half feet it was probably more like six or seven feet. I had cliff-front property for a brief period of time. It was so strange. I had a picture of where the telephone equipment right near the telephone pole had been pulled out by the water, and it was just sticking out wires sticking out. Just to keep it from being run into and pulled out further, I put these bungee cords around it and hooked it up to the telephone pole, which looked like it was in a solid spot, and they stayed there for the longest time, even with all the road work that was being done, because I think it was like Tuesday the following week it was not very long. We thought it would take forever for them to work on rebuilding the road. And what were they going to do? Well, the only place for the creek to be was where the creek was, unless you were going to just forget about having a road. And sure enough, there was a D-9 cat at the other end of where, as far as I can see, coming my way. I was so happy to see them pushing in dirt and creating a road there, because ugh! It was quite amazing. The drainage there is still a little iffy. But that's true for a lot of places. 44:54 But my house, where I lived in Lyons, was cut off. The road on the way up to my house was okay, but the Little Thompson, which is normally a fairly tiny trickle, except in the spring at certain times and I'm sure it's washed out that little section before. But I heard from a neighbor one of my old neighbors there that the bottom part there was 150 feet across, he was estimating. I couldn't get to it, because Lyons was closed off, and I knew there wasn't really anything I could do anyway. But I assumed, or I was hoping, that my other house would be okay. The house that Ed and I had bought the April after the fire was on a hill, and there were two really good drainage areas on either side of it. And so I hoped, barring any landslides or what have you, that it was okay. And indeed it was. The only problem for all my neighbors and me, if I had still been living there was access, because you couldn't get to it unless you were willing to hike up the other side. There's really no round-trip egress from that area. It's a road in and it's the same road out. And there was a huge amount of damage of course from the St. Vrain just pouring through this area is on the north side of Apple Valley Road, and it's eleven miles in where I lived eleven miles from Lyons, from the town of Lyons. But so much damage there. It was really quite amazing. And I could well, it was kind of odd, because I had my driver's license that still said I lived in Fourmile. I had changed it to Lyons just 10

11 written it in on the back of my license, but they were being pretty strict about who could drive in and who couldn't. Fortunately, my fishing license had my Lyons address on it. They didn't say anything about it one way or the other. I don't know how big of a deal that would have been. It never ceases to amaze me I probably drove up to that property maybe three or four times the next couple of weeks, once I could get there. It just amazed me how much damage and how different it looked, and you could hardly remember exactly how it had been previously, because it looked so very different. All those beautiful homes and that pretty area down by the river just inundated by somebody else's yard mud, fields flowing. Anyway. So I sent an to somebody, I'm not that I hadn't been all that big on s on my my typing skills are marginal but it was kind of a long , and I said, "I have the dubious distinction of owning three different properties, none of which I can get to." And then in the meantime, I forgot to say, I remembered the storage locker that I had rented on North Broadway, because the stuff that was in my Lyons house wasn't all going to fit into my Fourmile cabin that I had moved back into, so of course I had a rental until there for my stuff, the stuff that would presumably go into my other Fourmile house when it gets rebuilt. Okay. So, guess what? That storage locker was all mudded! And I think they called it just a total loss, because the roof fell in part of it. That did not happen in my storage unit. And fortunately, part of the things that I had stored in the storage locker were tires, and so a lot of stuff was on top of the tires, and who really cared if the tires got muddy? So that wasn't a really big issue. 50:00 But the insurance agent said that my policy did cover stuff, and so we took pictures of that. And then some friends and I had a work party and had shovels and masks and dug it out and that was pretty sad. And I had great appreciation and sympathy for people who had to deal with a lot of mud, because you don't think it's ever going to get clean. I can't imagine what it would have been like for people to walk down into their basements that were half full or more than half full of mud. But, time passes, and you just keep plugging away at cleaning up. I was so grateful for friends and a place to stay. Such good people. Your friends ARE your family. Oh, I had forgotten that my phone, my house phone in the rental cabin, my new home, was getting messages, because I didn't have an answering machine anymore. I had signed up for the Century Link automatic message thing. So when it finally dawned on me oh, I probably have messages on that because that's done in some central place, it's not on my phone. So I called and, oh my gosh, I had like 27 messages. I was just appalled, because I thought, oh, that would have been helpful if I'd thought of that earlier and then 11

12 people wouldn't have been worried. But in any case, that is a handy thing, not to have to rely on an answering machine that's dependent on your electricity. Since then, I've thought, I really do need to get a phone that plugs into a regular phone line. We had that at our other house, so even when the electricity went off, assuming that the phone lines didn't go down too, you could still get your phone service. But I haven't done that yet. One disaster at a time, I guess. It's strange how some people get more organized about what they are going to have you know, extra stuff in their car or extra coats or extra things to its a good thing to pay attention to stuff like that. You never know when things are going to happen. Although you can sort of plan that if its been raining, raining, raining for a week and you live in a burned-out area, there is a potential for your hillside slagging, so I might have thought of my escape route earlier than I did. But Through it all, my dog has been amazing as far as agreeable to whatever is happening. She's always been kind of a good companion that way throughout my husband's illness, and are we going to just wait here and stay here, or are we going to live in this house? She's done very well. My friends are, amazingly enough, after six months staying with them, I didn't think I did get some money from FEMA for housing, which was really nice and helpful. I passed that on to my friends, because that seemed only fair. They were the ones that were providing the housing. I did move my other truck. I have two vehicles, and I moved that truck to higher ground, but I didn't take it all the way up to Sunset. 55:04 We decided, as a community, that people that were helping each other out and visiting, getting together the two people that have generators in Sunset, we used to gather at their place at 6:00, and I used their computer, because I didn't have mine at the time. Let's see yeah, the community certainly did come together and in an amazing way. The fire department, of course, has been extremely helpful getting information and s and stuff out as to what's happening with cleanup and who needs to do what. It is like the fire the time after the fire the cleanup, the long-term recovery, is the tricky part, I guess. We didn't move here until '74, but I heard stories about the '69 flood and how neighbors who hadn't spoken to each other since they'd moved there were able to communicate during that time. This one was certainly an amazing adventure. It's amazing to me now to see how very quickly they were able to restore the roads to a passable condition so that people didn't have to spend a whole hour-and-a-half commuting to wherever they worked. The ones who lived in Coal Creek Canyon or the ones that lived in Nederland. You are so used to the normal route that you take, the way 12

13 you have to go, and to have it be suddenly be three times as long or even just twice as long is just quite an ordeal for people. I was I am fortunate that being retired, I didn't have to worry about getting to work, and that was a good thing. Having the flood insurance was a good thing. Having some wonderful friends was a good thing. I really missed my husband too, because although he had been ill for a long time, and certainly nobody wants a disaster, but I was thinking about, he had been a ham radio fellow for years and years since his teens actually. And I'm sure he would have really liked to have been able to help with the communication. So I was really sorry he wasn't around to be able to do that. On the other hand, since he wasn't as well and not as able to do that, maybe it was just as well that he didn't get to experience the real deal. (That sounds like maybe you've just recently had the best experience as a whole, finally you moved back into your restored cabin.) Yes, that's very true. And since it IS an old cabin I always had several projects to work on. But truthfully, although I would rather not have had the honor [laughs], it is a much better place than it was, and the back wall is definitely shored up. (Thank you so much for sharing this with us. We were fortunate enough not to have had the experience, but having listened to you speak, it gives us a feeling of how much courage and how much thought and consideration for others that went into your own personal experiences. Thanks.) Thank you. 60:23 [End of interview] 13