The flood: Take 2

The flood has been very much on my mind this past week—no surprise to anyone who lives in northern Colorado. When I wrote last week, I talked about being amazed by people’s resilience in the face of such tragedy and unending stress. I’m still amazed by that, but I also realize, increasingly, that it may have been the fact that I was not directly impacted by the flood that let me drift into an outsider-looking-in celebration of resilience. Since then, I’ve encountered the flood on a new level. While I still celebrate resilience, I feel like my earlier blog focused on that to the neglect of the awful moments, days, and weeks that people have endured during and in the wake of these floods. Especially, I failed to hear the stories that don’t make the news. The ones we—or at least I—really need to hear.

So, The flood: Take 2.

It’s now being called the 1,000-year rain, the 100-year flood. This doesn’t mean that rain like this comes regularly once every 1,000 years or a flood like this once every 100 years. If that were true, we could prepare for these events. Instead, it means that rain like this has 1 chance in 1,000 of happening in any given year, a flood like this has only 1 chance in 100 of happening in any given year. Either (or both) could happen next year … in fact, the odds for that happening will still be 1/100 and 1/1,000.

These numbers are dramatic descriptions as meteorological statistics go. But more to the point, as the days unfold, I learn more and more about what they mean in human terms.

Over the past week, I have heard a constantly morphing collage of conversations about the post-flood realities that are people’s lives. As we’ve learned more, coffee shop chatter and conversations with friends have changed from how lucky many of us were to talk of just how bad it was. Countless homes were damaged, some beyond repair. Even more basements were flooded—including in “safe” zones well away from streams. Worse, in many of these, the flooding came when over-full sewers surged up into people’s homes. Scores of businesses and public facilities were damaged—libraries with their stores of books, medical facilities with their million-dollar equipment, small businesses barely holding on even before the flood. Homeowner’s and business insurance covers little if any of this, so the consequences will be long lasting—and will spell financial disaster for some. 

The stories from mountain towns are dreadful. Many towns are still shut off from outside travel, although a few key roads were opened late this week. Some folks are taking circuitous routes through the mountains, traveling for hours to get to jobs in Boulder or Denver, where they’ll stay indefinitely. Some towns are unlikely to have any outside connection until next summer. Many people have no home to go back to, even if they could get in.

The worst stories, of course, are those about people who didn’t survive the storm. For days, scores of people were unaccounted for—over 1200 at one point. That number dropped daily as people were able to get out and contact friends or as phone service and cell towers were brought back on line. Still, after a week and a half, the count still stands at 82 people unaccounted for statewide, with 3 missing and presumed dead. The death toll is 4 in Boulder county, 8 statewide.

And then there’s the residual infrastructure mess: roads and bridges, water treatment plants and sewer systems, cell towers, electrical lines, buried cables … the list just keeps growing. Add to that the oil spills. Eastern Colorado is an oil-producing region, and some of those wells were right in the path of this 100-year flood. The spills reported to date are small—especially in the context of millions of gallons of untreated sewage carried by the flood waters. But it’s yet another painful reminder of how vulnerable our human enterprises remain to the capriciousness of nature.

For those of us who felt no direct impact, there are constant reminders of what happened. Trees down, open areas denuded, gravel and debris strewn across lawns. Roads and parking lots still full of mud and debris or bordered by the telltale piles of mud and debris left by graders. Hotels and motels in Boulder and surrounding towns chock full with the cars of local residents seeking temporary shelter, non-local cars bearing friends and family who came to help, and service trucks of every ilk with out-of-state license plates.

Which brings me to the stories that aren’t so widely noticed, that aren’t reported by the media.

One of these is precisely the unusual, sort of weird and complicated presence of so many out-of-town workers. On the one hand, it’s truly wonderful that they’re here—people gathering from miles away to help. On the other hand, it feels creepy—strangers hovering like vultures around the disaster, looking to profit from tragedy. Clearly, it’s good that they’re here—we need them. But it’s creepy at the same time. This morning we heard an ad on the radio for one such company. It convinced me that I wouldn’t call them if I could help it—it was just too sweet, too soothing … too commercialized rescue. But that’s easy for me to say. I don’t need to seek help, accepting it even if it comes from strangers who feel predatory.

I came to realize another invisible impact of the flood through a story on NPR. It mentioned a man who lived in an area that was directly in the path of the flood. When emergency workers knocked on his door, warning him to leave, he heard the knock but didn’t answer. He was afraid it was ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) coming to take him away because he’s undocumented. 

Another experience in a similar vein: I had volunteered to participate in a “citizenship workshop” this past Saturday, a program where volunteers (like me) help people to apply for citizenship. The event, scheduled for just a week after the flood, was cancelled, and no reason was given. I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was because this program draws largely from Latino communities, and those communities were disproportionately affected by the floods. One of the largest Latino communities around here is located in Longmont, the scene of heavy flooding, with parts of town destroyed and other parts cut off by the flood. Other large Latino communities are in areas around Denver, some of which were also severely flooded, and on the eastern plains, directly downstream from these same rivers and streams.   

It was these stories and others like them that made me realize how limited my earlier thinking about the flood had been. Yes, resilience is wonderful, and we need to celebrate it, perhaps especially in the midst of horrors like this. But focusing only on that—and doing so from the perspective of someone who was incredibly fortunate—risks missing something deeper. Something that includes the unseen, often unacknowledged side of disasters of this sort: the people who have little power in the first place and who are faced with huge losses and huge risks that others of us can’t even imagine—that we don’t even think about as we reflect on how lucky we are:

The sense of creepy predatory invasion when we are at our most vulnerable. The fear of deportation and the separation from family, friends, all that life has been. The loss of an opportunity to apply for citizenship. Where do costs like that show up on the ledger of the flood’s damage?

So, more than a week after the flood waters began to recede, I find myself with a very different perspective on the whole event than I had in its immediate aftermath. Still grateful for my own good fortune, but far more conscious of the things I don’t even need to consider in my daily life—things that even color experiences as basic as safety and identity in a natural disaster. That’s a pretty good definition of privilege: not needing to think about things that others must think about constantly.

A lesson I need to learn over and over.