ZL: All right, this is Zach Lewis and Naomi Gerakios interviewing Carol and Gib Dunning. We

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1 Interview Transcription Interviewees: Carolyn and Gilbert Gib Dunning, residents of Drake, Colorado Interviewers: Zach Lewis and Naomi Gerakios Location: 270 River Fork Road, Drake, Colorado Date: June 27, 2014 Transcribed by: Zach Lewis Abstract: Carolyn and Gib Dunning own and reside in a home at 270 River Fork Road in Drake, Colorado; this residence was severely undermined by the Big Thompson s flooding in September The Dunnings survived the event, salvaged their vehicles, and rebuilt their home. Recalling their experiences, the retired couple lamented the lack of evacuation warnings, communication, and aid during the disaster. After several days of being trapped in the canyon, the two were airlifted to safety. The Dunnings were extremely grateful for the aid they received after the floods to establish a temporary residence and rebuild their home. Gib remained confident that if such a disaster were to occur in the future, government agencies would have learned lessons from the 2013 event and improved their response time and disaster management policies. ZL: All right, this is Zach Lewis and Naomi Gerakios interviewing Carol and Gib Dunning. We are at CD: Carolyn, I m sorry. ZL: Carolyn, my mistake. CD: L-Y-N ZL: Carolyn and Gilbert Dunning. GD: Gib, better known as Gib. ZL: Better known as Gib. We re at 270 River Fork Road in Drake, Colorado. It is June 27, 2014, and the time is 2:05 p.m. Uh, so thank you for meeting with us today. CD: Mm-hm. ZL: First off, let me ask you two, um, what is your date of birth, and where were you born? GD: I was born in Kansas and in 1925, so that makes me about 89 years of age today. Served almost three years, well just short of three years in World War Two as a gunner on a bomber, a very, Cadillac of bombers in my opinion, but I saw no real physical action however was there. Our plane got shot one time, and there wasn t much too that fortunately and, eh it made a little 1

2 hole in the lower right wing of the airplane and a little larger on topside. A little repair and away we went again so, that takes care of my World War Two, real quickly. ZL: And Carolyn, how about you? Date of birth and place of birth? CD: Oh my date of birth , and I was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, New Hampshire. Um. What else did you want to know about me? ZL: Oh, that s good to start with. When did you folks move out to Colorado? CD: Well, I didn t move out here until, let me see, we got married in ninety-six. We ve been married twenty years, so we got married earlier than that. GD: Ninety-six. CD: Oh, was it? Oh yeah cause it s our nineteenth anniversary coming up this fall. And, but I had come out in 91 and had come out of a marriage that never should have been. [Chuckles]. But I had been married to Air Force people, had two children, uh, prior to meeting Gib, and what was nice was that my daughter, who was an attorney and she married an attorney, had gone to school in California, but she came, they came out here too after, cause she wanted to be near us. And so I ve been out here since 91; prior to that oh, I lived in 4 different countries and 22 different states by the time I finished counting. Sometimes it was only for 6 months because of my ex-husband s career field. Because he was in intelligence, and I guess once you solve the case and you re uncovered you can t stay around too long. But unfortunately that s what happened in the marriage, too. You know, he really couldn t discuss his job or anything like that. So, not his fault not my fault, but. ZL: Okay. Gib, what s your story on moving to Colorado? GD: Well I came here after my service in My sister and husband were living here in Colorado, out in the farm area, and I went to their area and briefly farmed and helped them farm my sister and her husband and then shortly thereafter I got into the service station business and was a service station employee and operator for a little over 20 years. And then moved from the town of Sterling over here in the northeast part of Colorado to Fort Morgan, and it s been about, oh less than twenty years I guess it was but thereabouts as a real estate salesman and broker for that time. CD: Do you think your tape is picking his voice up? ZL: I think it ll be fine; we can adjust it later, too. GD: Anyway I was a real estate broker for many years and that was my most enjoyable occupation. Part of it was due to the fact that it became pretty successful for me. I made some fine deals in real estate. I specialized pretty much in farm and ranch, and when you sold farm and ranch it was a million dollar deal. And of course that commission was shared by several people 2

3 in most cases so, you know it wasn t quite as fantastic as some people would maybe expect, but I enjoyed it a lot and made a good living at it. ZL: Excellent. I just wanted to ask quickly about your family, your immediate family. She said Carolyn, you said you had two children in your previous marriage? CD: One is living in Fort Collins now, she s the one that s married to an attorney there, but they have 4 little children between 5 and 11. And so they decided he s been very successful. So they decided that they d rather the mother take care of the children instead of having somebody else take care, so she s been at home for about 10 years now. I watched the oldest one for a couple of years, um but actually it s wonderful you can see a difference in, uh, you know, well they re very secure children, and they re very much family. You know, everything s family to them. And I have a son, Chris, who s three and a half years younger, and, by the way Heather my daughter is just as straightforward and outspoken as I am. I think the women in my family are very strong-minded, as Gib would probably attest to. And, uh But my son lives in Seattle and he s in banking in the Seattle area. Don t see him as much. Sons don t go home as much as daughters do. NG: [Chuckles]. ZL: Fairly typical, I suppose. How about you, Gib? Any children? GD: Yes, I had three and my oldest daughter, oldest child is in California, and she worked 30 years for an electrical company, and apparently had a good life there. My next son was working for an electrical outfit in California also, but somehow lost his life, not as a driver but as an occupant of a car that they were coming back from picking up his son, and somehow the car run off the road and hit an obstacle. He was killed; his son is okay and was not hurt any. And I have a youngest son who is in Denver and has worked most of his life as a. CD: He s a CPA so, yeah, he just changed jobs. Gib and I have discussed it, and we think it is due to the fracking industry, which we personally, neither one of us feel comfortable about, especially after they started having earthquakes [chuckles] in Greeley and Weld County. But, anyway, Mark has two children, too. So, ah My son doesn t have any children yet but they have a beautiful dog. [Chuckles]. ZL: That s almost as good as a child sometimes. CD: Well, it s their dog and, although Heather and Richard the one with the 4 little children they have a dog, too. Scout, German Shepherd, and when I go over there all 4 children line up by the stairway after I get in the door so Scout can get settled with Grammy because the dog knows I love her. And so she just cries and carries on and everything, and finally she gets worn out and Grammy can hug the children. It s kind of silly, but it s fun. 3

4 ZL: All right, well those are, you know, all our little background questions. We can move on to talking about the flood events now I suppose. CD: Good. ZL: So, how long, or, when did you purchase this property? This home? GD: Uh, we purchased it in, well adjacent properties, let s see, in 1996 I believe it was, and somehow It was an older home, and I repaired it and found that I could make a pretty good sale with some profit, so I was able to buy a lot next door. CD: Which we re on. GD: No. Anyway, I bought the lot next door, built a house on it and sold the old one at a pretty good profit, and that went along for 6 or 7 years ago. Six or seven years, and I found the lot that this house that we re living in now is situated on and built the house here realizing real estate was a pretty good occupation and sold the second house, and now we re in the third house that we ve lived in up here. CD: And we do believe they lined up this way. GD: Yeah, they re side-by-side. CD: And his first one, we watched float down the river the biggest night of the flood. Just went, floated right down at the end of our other neighbor s driveway further down. ZL: That s wild. GD: And there s no remains of it whatsoever. CD: Just the back porch. Yeah. GD: Well, no house there. CD: No, no. ZL: All right so we ll go into the standard sort of questions now. So how were you, your home, or your business I guess, how were you and your home affected by the flood? GD: Well, um, as far as I was concerned when we left this house the evening of the first devastation of the flood, which would have been CD: Thursday night. That Thursday night of that week. GD: That sounds right. I was thinking it was a little earlier than that, but anyway, we walked to the neighbors. The flood didn t come with one big bam it kept raising and raising, and we could see that well, maybe we d better The neighbors urged us to come over to them, to their 4

5 place and we went there and spent the first night there, or most of the first night, I think all of it maybe. And this was on a hill above our current house, and those folks were quite sure as I was that this house would never be damaged. Well, I was wrong. The flood kept rising and rising, and we spend 2 or 3 nights in an abandoned motor home up on the hill above our house, which was quite a distance from the flood. CD: That was where the bear was. GD: So we kept running, I kept running back and forth. Carolyn was kind of handicapped at that time, on oxygen, so I kept running back and forth down here and [to] pick up odds and ends and the flood water kept rising and rising, and the first thing I know, it was devastating the lower floor of our garage. Thank goodness we have a two story home, and the lower floor, lower floor of the flooded house became well ah, almost a river running through our house that broke out our windows and then started undermining our garage floor, and it devastated, devastated that for ohh, at least two days, maybe three. And as time went on it uh undermined the garage floor, although it didn t move the cars. The two cars stayed there. CD: Yeah. Two cars were stuck in there. GD: And it washed out the driveway completely, took it all away, and it was about a four foot drop from the front door of the garage to both vehicles. And they weren t uh removable. And also the vehicles and the floor underneath them was undermined to the point where garage floor fell in about three feet, and they have sat there, there sat there for six or seven months without any chance to move them out. CD: Because that was because the entire road was destroyed, too. And the worst thing was, you know, because well, we did have access, and we did go up and stay with our daughter in Fort Collins. But, and they had they ve got a really big, big house, and we had the whole bottom floor GD: Basement floor. CD: Yeah, and, but there s no kitchen down there so, I was quite sure because the kids would forget and let the dogs start to come down the stairs, and I thought for sure my cat was going to be decapitated. And also, we were breaking up their routine, you know no matter what, you know we re family and everything. But Heather is a very that s my daughter very organized person, and uh so we really were disrupting them. And so after months we were able to find another house in Fort Collins to move into. GD: To rent. CD: Yeah, to rent. Which really was good. And we were much more comfortable there. And we still saw them, saw them all the time and everything, but I think they were more comfortable about it too. You know, we re old people, we re very active for old people, but we still it still 5

6 interfered with how their family dynamics were. And we were very aware of that. And I was also very aware about their German Shepherd dog decapitating the cat cause the kids would come running up, you know, Grammy, we forgot not to let Scout down here, you know. GD: Doesn t tell much about the flood though. You re getting off on another story. CD: So, anyway, the flood came down around that curve, [points towards the north end of the house where the river flows west to east in front of their property] if you can see that, and it reverted to the original course of the river, you see? It was gravity that threw it, and it was coming miles an hour. By the way we never received any notification to evacuate or anything. Some poor volunteer fireman in waders uh that at that point weren t doing him much good, I guess, finally was able to come across our bridge because by that time it was just filled with debris. Our bridge never collapsed or anything; it was just so full of debris [coughs] that you couldn t have gotten a vehicle over there or anything anyway. You couldn t walk over it or anything. And of course the water was all the way you can see if you look outside where the water stopped, you know as far as rising. And so it came flooding around, and that s where it crashed through the window down here [points towards a window located at the basement on the north end of their home] and then actually took out the northwest corner of the foundation of the house. And so they yellow-tagged us, if you re aware of the grading, and uh, but this top part of the house was not touched at all, which was wonderful that Gib had built the house over the 2 car garage. And so But we couldn t access the house, there was no way for us to get here, and we couldn t stay in the house because of course of the tag system. GD: There were no utilities here. CD: Oh yeah, utilities were all wiped out. Everything was wiped out. It was like this. You can see a moonscape here. And so, finally Saturday, noon time, someone came and told us um, if um that if that Century Link, they were the helicopters that looked like a little turtle or green frog underneath that they had landed on a little sand bar down here. GD: The river had gone down by that time. CD: Yeah, the river had receded and that was by Saturday noon. And that they would evacuate us and my cat, GD: And all of our neighbors. CD: and two of our neighbors with a dog they had been babysitting, which was interesting. And so we just had to climb down through there, and it was a mess. They built, some of the neighbors built a bridge, they broke into the state building down here and built a little bridge out to the sand bar out of railings, you know, that they put along the highway. And so that s how we got out there, and they took us into the airport Loveland Fort Collins airport. And my daughter and son in law picked us up and everything. People react differently. Gib, Gib and I are just 6

7 about the age of the other, what they call the elderly neighbors. We don t feel elderly. We know we re old, but we re not elderly, you know. And so uh, it, it s really, we feel good. That we didn t, we coped. We didn t collapse. Both of us are pretty, you know, tough people I guess, because the other couple with us as soon as they got into the airport and sat down inside they just started crying. And, you know, people react differently. And these people, they really hadn t had any uh extra difficult things happen to them in their married life or anything. They grew up on farms, in Greeley, outside of Greeley area. They were married to the same people all their lives, and never went through anything traumatic like that. He was fully employed, and she stayed home all the time. They had a, you know, a lifestyle that was just very secure and unwavering. Whereas Gib, at his age, in Kansas, he grew up during the Depression with 11 kids in the family, and at 12 years old he had to leave home to go work on a farm because his folks couldn t afford to keep the kids at home. And so then, on what, one farm, they did let you ride a horse to school every day, 3 miles each way, but there he was 12 years old doing regular farm work. GD: I was a little older than that when I rode that 3 miles. I was say 15. CD: So then he would go home for a little bit, did you go home between jobs? GD: Oh, briefly, I don t know. Is this pertinent to our story? ZL: I mean, not particularly, but it actually segues into a question I wanted to ask, which was have you, um How does the flood of 2013 compare to any other natural disasters that you ve experienced in your lifetimes? CD: I ve been through earthquakes. The earthquake didn t really bother me. I was through in California. Didn t bother me. I just sat still until it was over, and it wasn t extended. The time element wasn t extended Zach. Uh, you know, things were destroyed, but it didn t affect me that way. Uh. Let me see, what else have I been through? I usually Wherever I lived there was a disaster that happened, and so that s the other thing, I think I was used to. There was flash flooding down in Texas where we were stationed and everything. Um. You know, there were just all different things, and so you just kind of waited for it to get over. And then you did something about it. I m sorry I got off the subject before. But anyway that is probably where I learned by coping skills, and Gib learned his coping skills with, what disaster did you go through? Your, your marriage? GD: Let s don t get into that. [All chuckle]. As a young man I was, I was on my own from a pretty young age, so, where do you want to start? What I d like to tell you about, if you re interested, this was our septic system. So you can see it probably [shows a picture of the Dunning s septic system, which was located in their front yard]. CD: Yeah, it just pulled up the septic system. 7

8 GD: You want to go ahead with it, or should I? CD: No, I ll let you talk. GD: This is our septic system and it went out here about 100, 150 feet, completely disrupted everything. So that gives you a little idea of what we saw when we came back here, which was just a matter of a week or ten days after the flood we came down, somehow got through from Estes here. We could come that far, and then we walked up the high road here and skidded down the hill you might say, back behind us, and was looking through the debris. And Heather, her daughter, and my nephew brought us in here, and they looked over at everything, and they said, Give it up, let her go. Get out of here. CD: Walk away. GD: Yeah he wanted us, knowing our financial situation and mortgage and all that, both of them seemed to know that, and they said, You might as well give it up. You can t do it. And I said, I m not ready to give it up. So we went to work then. ZL: Well it s clear that you ve done a very good job restoring it and everything so far. GD: Well, we ve had some help. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management uh gave us funds, and we brought in some very good people who said, Hey, this is what we need to do. And they got in and brought in the soil that filled up our vehicles. Of interest to me was that the vehicles sat there for 12 mo for 7 months, and we could not move them until they filled in behind them. And so they had to set there for 7 months. We of course had to go out and buy another vehicle, and we got along fine with that. CD: You should tell them what we got. We got it from Habitat, and the grandchildren called it the roller skate. It was a 91 Ford Fiesta. You know what those are? But it got us to where we wanted to go and everything, forty miles an hour, and it was white, and that s why the kids, the grandchildren called it the roller skate. And uh, fortunately we were old enough that we knew how to drive a standard shift. GD: Not forty miles an hour. That was forty miles per gallon, of gasoline, so had a real bargain there. CD: Not forty miles an hour, forty gallons. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry. ZL: That's fine. CD: But anyway people have been nothing but nice to us as far as, and we've heard people knock the county, Larimer County. There has not been one person we have worked with that has not been wanting, you can just feel, that they wanted to help. They were not going to place any barriers, um, in front of us. And then if anything, FEMA, FEMA was good, too. It's just that, you know, they have these disasters all the time, and so they were a little more, uh, detached. 8

9 ZL: Casual about it? CD: Yeah, and, but, no we, um And we found out about programs that we didn't realize existed that were able to help us and uh things like that. 'Cause, you know of course we're on Social Security mostly. So this was a big hit financially on us. Um, and And, so, actually, we've come out of it pretty good. Except I still haven't got the house cleaned up again. I don't know, it was just sitting still, for 7 months in here. So everything kind of had to be cleaned, and we had to get another refrigerator. We found that one used so actually in Fort Collins. Because the food in our other refrigerator had stayed for 7 months, and so that got out. GD: He's got another question. ZL: Oh, no, that's fine. This is going very well. CD: I won't say another word unless you tap me on the shoulder, how's that? GD: Relax Carolyn. CD: Uh-huh, okay. ZL: We're doing fine. So it seems that after the flood you were able to get a lot of assistance from several different, sort of, local, state, and even federal agencies, but it seems that during the flood you felt very much on your own? At first at least, before those helicopters arrived? CD: Well, we felt trapped. That's how we felt. Because we did not get notified, and that, that upset me because we could've gotten our vehicles out, and driven down through the canyon before that rest of the water got down here to Drake. And in hindsight, I don't know if they handled the release of the water the way they should have. And of course that's in a lot of peoples' minds. That it could have been done better. Because they just opened those gates all at once. NG: Can you describe how they opened it, at least from your perspective? CD: Yeah, the lake was getting too full and couldn't handle to hold any more water, so they didn't want Estes to get flooded, and so, and so they just opened the gates. And the thing is, there are diversion paths of ditches and things like that that they could have daily because that water didn't come down in just 2 hours or so; it took 3 or 4 days. And so they could have daily released more water, not just down through the canyon but in these, uh, diversionary ditches and everything, like over to Pine Valley, is it? And so that's how Lyons and the Big Thompson got the brunt of it. 'Cause they just let it out. NG: And that was Lake Estes that they let the water out of? CD: Yeah. Yeah. 9

10 ZL: Very interesting. CD: Now, there is, what is that, the water thing up there by that the government owns? GD: Well are you talking about gates that they can open and close? Is that what you're referring to? CD: Yeah, the one, the water up by that campground. And everything. GD: The lake... Estes Lake there had the option of opening it and, or cutting it down, and we see today that there are other sources that would have taken that floodwater and diverted some of it rather than what we got here was pretty extreme. [Shows picture of two cars in the Dunning s garage]. My thoughts were here to show you just how deep it probably was half the depth of our garage floor to the ceiling, it probably got about that deep. So that means there was a lot of water coming through here. CD: They had to dig four foot of silt out of our back storage room. And the garage floor had already sunk about four foot. Because what happened was all the soil got raked as the water roared down and just pulled it all out. And that's why out there is all silt. I think I told you I had over 50 roses, and we had a beautiful yard, and Gib had a beautiful lawn, and I mean GD: Lots of trees out here too, its, well somebody described it as, I mean after the flood when nothing had been moved, just piles of large rocks just bouncing around, Gosh, it looks like the moon out there. [Traffic in the background] GD: Just an assortment of wild rocks, but they've taken that all up and smoothed it up, and we're looking good as far as we're concerned. We'd like to have some grass and some trees out there again, but that's what I miss. CD: Yeah and landscaping is an investment, of course no one had flood insurance. In fact I even talked to the county people at one time. They said No, you're not in the flood plain, so you don't have to worry about getting flood insurance. Well, we really weren't in the flood plain. It was only just a little bit there, so I don't blame the county engineers at all. What I blame is the extraordinary amount of water that was released at once. It was the difference between spilling a glass of water that was a quarter full compared to a glass of water that was completely full. GD: Well you wouldn't say all at once though, Carolyn, because day by day it got deeper and more vicious. CD: Because we were having more and more rain. GD: And the rain was coming, but it was three days before it got to its maximum here. When we walked out of here the water wasn't even, well I think it might have been running just a little bit, 10

11 matter of inches, on our road, and then that was Thursday evening and it was just barely running and various people asked us, Well why didn't you get your cars out? Well at that time the water was running over the bridge down here, [points towards the bridge a quarter mile south of their home that connects to Highway 34] I don't know, maybe 2 or 3 feet deep, so we couldn't have driven out, even at our first option which could have been that very evening. CD: Although, by 11 o'clock Thursday night, later, that's where we stood in our other neighbor's house down here that is pushed back in from where we are, and watched two neighbor's houses float down, plus my garden shed and that had all my garden stuff in it, too. No, we're really very fortunate. You know? We're sitting here talking to you and we were able to find agencies and organizations that were geared to help us recover and so, you know, it's less than a year later and we're doing fine. We're working outside and trying to make it look like we've lived here forever again. And stuff like that. GD: We are very, very lucky, really and truly. We see the neighbor's homes, their front yards, their lawns, their utility buildings, all gone. Well we lost one main building for our utilities, lawns, all of that stuff, but all I do today is look around and say, you know I was, we were really lucky because we got out alive. We got our home to live in, I'm thrilled I just say. We've just got to raise our sights a little higher. We're doing great. CD: Except for vegetation, when you look at the outside of our house, it's the way it was before. And so we've been in the house now for what, 2 months? GD: Not quite, yes, yes it has been. Yeah, just 2 months within a matter of a few days. CD: And we really, you know, when we first got home we just kind of hung out, at first. It was good to sleep in your own bed, and when the cat came in, because we had dragged him from one place to another. In fact he was in a carrier here when we went up the side of the mountain I think. He and Gib had never been really buddies, so Gib said, Why don't we leave the cat here? And I said, Gib, if the cat doesn't go, I don't go. And Gib said, Ugh. But anyway he got home here, and he just paced the entire perimeter of the house, the interior of the house, because you know animals stress, too. And you could tell he was just happy to be home and amazed. [Laughs]. You could tell he was amazed. GD: I bet they have other questions. CD: I know. I get so carried away. ZL: That's all right. We are here to hear your stories, but it's good to try to stay a little focused I suppose. So, how did the flood of 2013 change your ideas about preparation, planning, management, and recovery from water disasters? Like, more simply, like, what are you going to do differently in the future now in spite of this? CD: Leave earlier. Yeah. 11

12 GD: Well, in my opinion we were so fortunate to have our house built back on the bank enough that other people say, Well are you going to go back? Would you go back to the house and keep your fingers crossed for another flood? I don't see another possibility of anything like this. In my opinion, the people who control the floodwaters are undoubtedly working like crazy today making sure that if anything like this, you know, what was it 10 inches, 12, 15 inches, I hear all kinds of figures, that if it should occur again, there are going to be plans working right now to take care of this kind of volume, in my opinion now. Nobody's told me that, I'm quite sure if I were, let's say, if I had anything to do with the flow of the river from Estes Park which is where basically it all came from, possibly some of the lakes around that area, but I think those people are, if not working today they've got plans in their head that say, This is what we plan to do. We've gotta do this to divert anything in the future. CD: This is one comment, we need to emphasize. You are taking oral history of this and everything. What has been interesting is everyone that I ever talked with that worked for the county, they weren't old enough to be working for the county at the other flood time in '76. So there was no working history within the county arena, city arena even in Loveland or Fort Collins or whatever because I know the Poudre overflooded too and everything, to provide some direction. So I think that they are well aware of this now, that that has to be documented. I used to be a counselor, and I worked for Larimer County and other organizations. The main thing was document, document, document. Because, when you documented, if you weren't in that day or you left your job or whatever, someone else could move in, read your notes, and work off those accurately. Or at least to get some insight. They had no records of the people interaction. They might have had records of financial, like you know, they had to buy another truck or something like that, but it was the history that was missing. I talked to 2 or 3 engineers at Larimer County, and that might be somebody interesting for you to research with. Because they had no history. And so you might ask them, when you had no history to work off, what did you do? How did you evaluate your steps to help people and protect people and everything like that? Because it was a specific disaster. So that might be something that you might be interested in doing but, no. None of those people are old enough to remember the other flood. So they had no idea what to do. They had no idea what the real repairs were that they had done to the canyon and the roadways and everything after the last flood. GD: I bet he's got other questions. CD. Yes, I know he does. It's just to me that's a very strong thing because they, that's why they shouldn t get rid of the old people in companies sometimes, because they re the ones who have the history in their heads. ZL: That makes a lot of sense. Actually I'm just going through my question list and finding that you've actually addressed a lot of them already, in telling your other stories. CD: I probably did, Zach. I'm so sorry. 12

13 ZL: No, that's fine. We don't have to go in order. You know this is just fine. This has been a lot of really interesting information, and I appreciate it. CD: Good, I hope what we're telling you is valuable. ZL: One thing, we did some research, preliminarily, and read newspaper articles published about the events and one of them said that Gib, you were trying to salvage some of your items that had washed downstream? GD: After the flood? ZL: Yes. GD: I might have but I had so little, should I go into the details of well, for instance, I'm a horse person. I've been riding horses and owning them for most of my life, and have done quite a lot of trail riding and so forth in here and as far away as Mt. Rushmore, up in the Nebraska, Fort Robinson area, I go up there. So I had horse trailers, all of my tack equipment, barns, haysheds, corrals, and it all went with the flood. And I did, as you have maybe inquired, asking myself well where did it go to? And there's really not anything left of anything. The horse however... CD: Yes, about 5 years ago, Gib had a horse pass away, A.C., that he had had for what over twenty years. GD: Twenty years. CD: Yeah, and he and A.C. were pals and, but anyway, A.C. was pastured across the highway one time, at that time, and some idiot man driving up through the canyon... GD: Let's not get into that Carolyn. CD: Hit the horse at 35 miles an hour, as the horse was crossing the road, and so obviously they had to put him down. Well the thing is, A.C. was a beloved pet of the neighborhood, everybody loved A.C. he was very sociable. People would go up to the fence and A.C. would go over, and I swear he had a twinkle in his eye, he knew that I was not comfortable with horses, I know one of those twinkles was for me, but anyway so they had a memorial for him down here, there were probably what twenty-five people that showed up for a memorial for Gib's horse A.C. He was a beautiful horse. GD: I can still get tears in my eyes, over this horse. CD: Where's his picture, darling? You've got one in the hallway. But anyway, so then someone had a tractor or something had dug a big, big hole down here in the pasture and everything so they buried him in there and covered him up and someone even had made a memorial marker for him and everything. There was a little maybe 8-year-old boy that had watched A.C. out his window all his life up here, and he sobbed. You know? Another man came, and we didn't realize 13

14 it, but he used to walk his dog over by A.C. every morning, and A.C. and the dog would dance around the pasture together, just kind of doing a dance. They were friends and everything. So the man came with his dog... but anyway. So all the neighbors came and A.C. was buried, and he had his marker, and he really did everybody said a prayer for him, it was a very sad thing, for the neighborhood even. Not just Gib. So we grieve that A.C. went down the river. GD: Just the remains, because this has been like 3 years ago. CD: Yeah, well his grave site was disturbed and everything. And that was... someone gave Gib another horse, Big John. GD: Almost, not quite, gave. I bought him. CD: I thought you told me they gave him, but anyway, so anyway Big John, he was a big beautiful brown horse, and he and Gib kid of bonded but not like Gib and A.C. and everything. So when Gib realized that the water was starting to rise and everything he was stabled right down here at the corner by the bridge. And so Gib went down and walked him across the highway You didn't? What did you do. He ended up on the other side of the hill. GD: That was where he was grazing. CD: Oh he was already up there. I'm sorry. He used to walk him across, so he had him on the other side of the highway anyway, and of course that goes up to Storm Mountain. Well the horse evidently just kept going higher and higher at the time of the flood, and so someone up on Storm Mountain did rescue him and kept him in their stable, and so then Gib found out about it and that was after they had like a primitive pioneer road built on the back of Storm Mountain, I guess it was very primitive, so Gib got a ride up, at that time he was 88 years old, he got to ride up in a Humvee to the top of Storm on the backside, and he rode that horse ten miles back down through the Morrisville Road, and he said actually it was a better ride than going up in the Humvee. [Everyone laughs] GD: It was, because of the roughness of the road. The horse kind of levels the rough spots out. CD: But he had no place to keep him so now John has, now he belongs to a lady in GD: That's the horse, John. CD: Belongs to a lady in Cheyenne, what's that ladies group that rides horses in parades or something? ZL: I'm not sure. CD: So John's in a happy spot. But Gib and everybody did feel bad about A.C. not, you know, his grave site being disturbed. 14

15 ZL: Well, did you have any other questions that were burning you, Naomi? NG: I was just going to ask, you mentioned that you got a lot of different assistance from people at different levels, could you maybe tell us about who you were interacting with and how those took place? CD: Of course FEMA, right away, and we did, we were airlifted off the mountain with the clothes on our back and everything, and so we were able to go to the disaster center in Loveland and obtain some extra clothes, and then also food supplies, and even though we were staying at our daughter's for the first month, those food supplies really came in handy after we moved into the other house and we were on our own. Before then, Heather would not let us use it, you know, she said, No, we've got plenty of food and everything. So FEMA really, the disaster center, and that was also incorporated with Larimer County and other local organizations, you know? And then, let me see, I read in the Loveland paper about this loan program, with Larimer County Home Improvement Loan Program and I called right away and you had to qualify and we did, and so I think we were one of the first ones that were able to assail [sic] ourselves of that. And they're the ones that actually, the loan I heard last week that after 5 years it turns into a grant, so we're very fortunate in that aspect, but it's actually lien on the mortgage. But also it does not, we do not have to make any payments no matter what, until at the time that the house is sold. Which means if we stay up here, then, you know, the entire thing wouldn't have to be paid back as a lump sum or anything. So that's been wonderful. And then the long-term recovery program, they've been great to us to. They were the ones that were able to find a church group from, um, Grand Junction that had come over, and they came, and I think it was for about four hours that one group just dug out all that dirt... GD: Mud CD: mud that had gone into our storage room down there that was four foot deep. There was no way It would have affected my breathing. I couldn't have gone down there and had all that fluttering around. And Gib, you know, you can't expect him to be doing everything, although I call him my hero all the time. But, hey, you know, it was just beyond us. So that long term recovery program has helped tremendously, too. And our church chapel that was down here, that is still in repair, they meet still in Loveland. It's non-denominational. And they've been really helpful too, just in encouragement and everything. Right? GD: I would say just encouraging us. There was some financial help. It wasn't a lot, but you know, any amount in cash, they're always good to feel. That sounds like good money to me. CD: And even our own children, we never asked them for any financial help. They haven't really offered it, uh, because we're fairly independent. And we can do this. GD: Well, yes. 15

16 CD: They've got their own lives to live, you know. GD: Yes, you missed a little bit there Carolyn. I got some from my daughter in California, right? CD: I didn't know about that. GD: Yes you did, I told you about it. CD: You told me about it last week. GD: Well, does it matter? [Both laugh]. CD: Well he's not a drinking man, so I'm not going to worry about where it went. Obviously it went someplace where it was needed. GD: A lot of moral support though, and that's so important, you know, it is. CD: Oh, and when we went and got that little car, the American Red Cross, let me back up a minute. Everybody that we would see down at the disaster center that we knew from the canyon, and we know just about everybody in the canyon In fact they used to call Gib the honorary mayor of Drake, but anyway we belong to the association in the canyon and everybody knows everyone else, friend or foe, whatever. And, uh, so we would see them down at the disaster center, and we'd hear these horror stories from em, from them, that they couldn't get help anywhere, nobody would help them. We never felt that way. We always felt that, like when we went to the Red Cross they said, Oh don't go to the Red Cross; they're not going to help you at all. We needed some cash to get another car without turning around and putting ourselves in debt. And so we went to the Red Cross, and between our own funds that we had and some other monies that some other people had given us, and the Red Cross because they gave us money for it, too we were able to come up with what, the twelve hundred dollars for this little skate, which is all we needed. We just needed transportation. If we'd been younger we would've reverted to bicycles or something, but, we just, on a rainy day it's nice to be covered. And so, uh, so you know, even the Red Cross helped us in that aspect and everything. GD: My belief is, the way we presented ourselves, not as, you know, we're not out here begging. Here's our story, we presented it just the way it was. We weren't crying. We presented our situation, and rather than demanding or anything like that, I think they got a story that says, you know, this sounds pretty logical. We didn't try to extrapolate or to extend our situation beyond what it really was. You know, it, it was not so good, but so many people suffered a lot more, I mean the complete houses. Our neighbor had a house there that, well who was it Ed Egloff there, his house was wiped clear down. If this were rock, that's where it was. You couldn't even see a foundation down there. And that's only about, oh, a couple of blocks down here, so weren't we really quite fortunate. 16

17 CD: We were blessed, and the thing was that we didn't look at ourselves as victims. We really, we didn't, and we don't, do we? We look at ourselves as we happened to be at the wrong place and everything, and we wish it hadn't happened because it inserted some time in our life that we wish we could have, you know, spent out doing something else. But we've survived, and we feel good about it. We feel, you know... GD: I'd like to show you our basement, before you leave. CD: Oh, yeah. ZL: We would like to see it. GD: Because it really has turned out, there were certain things. I did a lot of, I'm pretty much a cobbler is about all I could say. I mean I'm not really a carpenter. But I could show you what it looked like now, it s in really better shape than it was before the flood. CD: Well, and it's stronger. That's another thing. The houses that appeared to be heavily damaged and even disappeared, they were houses that were standing be They survived the first flood in '76 1, but obviously there must have been some damage that occurred from that flood that this flood just, kind of, canceled it all out. GD: Well in our opinion, and most everybody agrees with this, the '76 flood, at first, was worse than this one. And then the more that we saw from day to day, and they eventually agreed, this is worse than the '76 flood. CD: Yeah, 'cause these two houses up at the end, there summer people, when this flood Oh, this flood isn't as bad as the one in '76, but now they're the first ones to say that it was much worse. So I think that that's what it is. Damages that were not seen or really repaired well at the time of that first flood, and don't forget, they didn't have so many regulations in place. Like, you know, we had to get a building permit. We had to have a permit for new septic; it had to be inspected and everything. They didn't do that after the last flood. That's what history, uh, should, uh, show, that, okay maybe a lot of people thought that the county was being in their face and everything saying, Okay, you can't rebuild until our inspectors go in and say you can, if there's less damage then you can. If it's more than 50 percent damage, then you can't. They didn't have those regulations at the last flood, and they had no record of that. GD: I remember, I don't know whether to call him an inspector, but he came very, very shortly after the flood, and we were with him looking around, and he was just an inspector. He didn't approve; he didn't disapprove. And he stood out there, and he said that What was his comment? Abandon? Forget the rebuild, you should just abandon it. And I thought to myself, Here we have a house that we could have lived in throughout the whole flood if we'd have had 1 The 1976 Colorado Big Thompson Flood that occurred on July 31, Heavy rains caused flash flooding in the Big Thompson Canyon, killing 144 individuals and millions in dollars of damage. 17

18 the utilities. The basement was devastated, but the upper house was as it is today. So I wasn't about to concede to what this guy was talking about was give it up and walk away from it. No way. We like the home, we like the location, we like being up here... Its next to the river. CD: Well see we met as hikers and we've hiked hundred mile hikes together and everything, you know, so we love being up here anyway, although he's never got me on a horse except once. I need to get a drink of water darling. GD: She never knew what a horse was until she married me. [Everyone laughs. Carolyn coughs]. Well anyway, that about tells you the story. Are we about there? Or are we...? ZL: Yeah, we're about out of questions. I just wanted to ask if there were any, we're at the part where any final thoughts or comments you wanted to make? GD: I'd have to think about that a little bit. We pretty well covered, you know, the things that you and I didn't expect to be elaborating on, but, we're in good shape. I could even point out to you exactly where I saw the flood at, basically, the height of the water right out here [Points outside the house towards west]. And it amazed me that at like 8 o'clock in the morning of our last day of the flood just rolling, and, the last day, and I came down, this was like 8 o'clock in the morning, and the flood was probably at a maximum out there. By noon of that same day, I came back for whatever Carolyn was needing, and, no water. So somebody had a valve up there that was that forceful, that important and controllable, that it shut that water off. And I've wondered since, what happened? What kind of a trigger, what kind of a valve, was there that they could shut that water off within a matter of four hours? I mean from morning to noon, I still don't know the answer to that. Does that answer any...? ZL: That's interesting, definitely. I think we were just wrapping things up anyway, Carolyn. Any last comments? CD: Sorry I went on and on so much. ZL: No, no that's fine. CD: Okay, so is there anything else? That's why I was glad that Gib was able to sit in, too, because he gave a lot of insight. ZL: No, I just I just wanted to ask if you had any final thoughts or other people to recommend that we interview? CD: Well Joyce Kilmer is the one, and I can give you her phone number if you like, a-hem , and she has since, she is renting a house in Loveland on the way to Carter Lake now. And, but, you know, that was a terrible, traumatic thing for her to have go into. First of all, I had him as a support system and vice versa. And she was just, you know, she's 78 years old I think or something, maybe a little younger, but she sat up on the highway all night long by herself, and 18

19 that area down near Cedar Cove is known for having a lot of bears and mountain lions. I wouldn't, I think that's really where I might have fallen apart. But she, she is a tough old lady too and she stayed here all night, and finally somebody showed up on an ATV the next morning and got her out of there. Uh, but she probably has a lot to tell you. And uh, she does, uh, she belongs to DAR Daughters of the American Revolution that's why history to me is important. Especially growing up in New England, too. But, uh, she also does genealogy research. And so, you know, history's important. Hey, if you don't have history, you don t You're history majors. What is history? A record of preoccurances, and we really, I think the human race would really be in trouble if we didn't have history and a memory. ZL: I think that we're completely in agreeance with you. And that's actually the whole point of this oral history project is to hopefully better be prepared next time something like this happens. CD: Yeah. Because that, because that was interesting when I started checking in on, I have these little blurps of like, well I wonder how many of these people working in the county now, were here when the other flood was, because they must be having to resource them, like bigtime. Nobody. They had no resource. The only thing that they would have available to them was, say, people my age or above that might have lived up here in the canyon, and then they would have just, you know, physical records or something like that. And see that was one thing, we were always told, Well, even if there's a flood, it's not ever gonna get washed out again, especially in the Narrows or anything. That the Army Corps of Engineers came in and they rebuilt this to withstand a 500 year flood. And that's what they're saying now we had, a 500 year flood instead '76 was labeled a 100 year flood. But anyway, and of course it didn't withstand it. So, one thing I think that they've learned this time is that no matter what they try and do, that that river is going to return to its original course, through gravity, than stay where they push it, to stay beside the highway or anything like that. That's already occurred again, I think, as they've been rebuilding, they've been having trouble, so. So anyway, and who else would Oh Bus, up on the Glen Haven Road. Bus Tarbox, T-A-R-B-O-X, and he s, he's a very nice man, too. We only know nice people. [Laughs]. GD: He's articulate. He'll give you a good account with much more, oh, precise, I think. CD: Not rambling on like I do. GD: Quite good at that. CD: He's a retired journalist, and he also owned a printing company in Loveland. In fact he's working in Loveland helping his daughter now. But anyway he had a really nice house up on Glen Haven Road, almost near where you would turn to go up to Storm Mountain to Combat Rock or whatever, you know. Are you hikers or climbers? ZL: I like it. I am a hiker, so. 19