AURORA | For six days last September, torrential rains pummeled Aurora.
The rainfall left basements around the city full of water and busy intersections at a standstill. Parks looked more like lakes and roads looked like streams.
In all, from Sept. 9 to Sept. 14, more than 14 inches of rain soaked the city. In a typical year, always-arid Aurora gets just 15 inches of rain.
Still, a year after a flood that caused more than $3 million in damage to the city’s infrastructure, officials say when the water finally receded, Aurora had avoided serious damage during last fall’s five-day deluge.
“The city fared very well,” said Marshall Brown, director of Aurora Water.
Two Aurora Parks — Utah Park at East Jewell Avenue and South Peoria Street and Exposition Park near East Alameda Avenue and South Havana Street — were crucial, Brown said.
When people look at the parks, they likely assume they are designed primarily for people to enjoy the outdoors, be it on a soccer field or a playground. But the parks actually serve an important role during floods. Each park is designed to catch excess water from the surrounding neighborhoods, giving it a place to pool instead of letting it flow into homes and yards.
At the height of the flooding, each park filled with several feet of water. While some may have looked out over the parks and seen fields soaked and wrecked by the floods, Brown and his staff saw parks that did exactly what they were supposed to do, and in many cases, that held more water than engineers expected them to.
But none of that means there weren’t some very tense moments during those days, Brown said. Officials were worried that a dam near the old Lowry Air Force Base on the border between Aurora and Denver would breach, flooding densely populated neighborhoods in northwest Aurora and Denver. The dam came close to breeching, Brown said, but the water never did spill into the neighborhood.
And the city-owned Everist Reservoir, which sits near the Platte River in rural Weld County, was heavily damaged. The reservoir alone accounted for more than $1.2 million in damage and crews are still working to repair it.
Statewide, the flooding left eight people dead, destroyed almost 1,800 homes and caused more than $450 million in damages to roads alone, according to the Associated Press.
At Aurora Public Schools, the flooding caused about $530,000 in damage to district facilities, the bulk of which was covered by insurance. The district has asked the Federal Emergency Management Authority to cover the remaining total of about $210,000, a district spokeswoman said last month.
In the Cherry Creek School District, the flooding was less severe, with just more than $16,000 in damage. That was limited to an arts facility at Cherry Creek High School and to Overland High School’s athletic equipment shed at Utah park.
Both districts closed some schools at the height of the flooding.
CCSD Superintendent Harry Bull said there were some nerve-wracking moments for the district, especially for Highline Elementary and Village East Elementary School.
Fearing that Expo Park would breach and send a wave of water rushing toward Highline, Bull said officials had buses staged to evacuate the building.
The park held, but the buses proved necessary when Village East started taking on water and the school had to be evacuated.
“We literally were loading kids on the buses as the water was coming,” Bull said.
For Bull, who had just started his first school year as superintendent, the day was a rough one.
“All in all it was a happy ending, but during the unfolding of that day there was most certainly some tension,” he said.
Jason Batchelor, finance director for the city of Aurora, said that early on, city officials estimated the damage would cost about $5 million. That estimate included damage to roads, schools and homes around the county, he said.
For the city alone, the damage cost about $3.1 million, a figure that includes damage to water infrastructure, roads, parks and some city vehicles.
According to FEMA, Arapahoe County received $3.5 million in individual assistance after the flood and another $4 million in loans from the Small Business Administration.
County Commissioner Bill Holen was one of several Aurora residents who got help from FEMA after the flood damaged his Aurora home.
Holen said the water was more than a foot deep in his basement after it came rushing through window wells.
“It was a pretty extensive damage and it took a couple weeks for us to just get the place cleaned up and decontaminated,” Holen said.
With an SBA disaster loan of about $60,000, Holen said he and his wife, Aurora City Councilwoman Debi Hunter-Holen, were able to repair the basement.
But, Holen said, some pictures and other mementos wrecked by the flood couldn’t be saved.
“That’s the hard part of it,” he said. “You just can’t replace it.”