Flood.

So I'm sure there's a million and a half blog posts about the 2013 flood in Colorado, and here's one more!  I wish I would have been a little more with it and kept better track of the amount of rain that we got, but unfortunately I didn't.  I'm sure I was like lots of other people and didn't realize that our week of rainy weather was going to turn into this!  I'm not quite sure of all the rainfall totals - and it's hard to get an accurate count, but I think at MY house, we got somewhere in the 7" range.  I believe places around Boulder got in the range for 16-18" of rainfall.  For a girl who grew up on a dry land farm in Montana, and lived in arid Colorado for the past 12 years these numbers are shocking!

Our home fared very well, we didn't have any damage and no flooding, which was very fortunate.  We count ourselves very lucky under the circumstances.  There are many folks that have had catastrophic damages to their property.  I wish them the very best and pray that things will work out for the best for them.

So, essentially, the rain started Monday late afternoon/evening.  We were able to work and take kids to day care Tuesday and Wednesday.  By Thursday though, day care was closed, and we were hearing of flooding.  My in-laws came to watch the girls as they have been every Thursday this summer, and they said that it was getting serious out there - lots of water on roads.  I came to Boulder, saw some major flooding happening near the office park, went and got my computer and turned around and went home.  It continued to rain Thursday, and Friday morning, and we got some dry sunny weather Friday afternoon.  I believe we even had dry weather for the most part Saturday morning.  Baby girl had been playing with a plastic container outside, and by Sunday morning at 9:30 am it looked like this:

Using a crayon as my dip stick - this measure to be 5/8" of rain.  I decided to put it back outside and put a new container out to start measuring rainfall.  At 1:30 pm my new container looked like this:

This container after 4 hours of rain contained 1 3/8" of rain.  I then dumped this one, and put it back outside.

At 5:30 pm I brought the original container back inside and took another measurement - I believe this measurement is the 24 hour total from Saturday night to Sunday.  And it's reading just about 2.5 inches.  Wow!

By Tuesday, it was time to go back to work, I was excited to see the flooding around the office park.  Needless to say it was impressive!  This first picture is of a sidewalk that has turned into a river, on the east edge of the office park. 

This picture is on the south-east corner of the office park where the path makes a 90ish degree turn to the north.  A good reference with the bench sitting there - looks to be about 2 feet of flooding there.

This next picture is an underpass;  the boulder creek path normally goes under the railroad.  I would say that this tunnel is 7-8 feet tall?  Completely flooded.

I walked around and got on top of the tunnel and looked down - and was very surprised to see this, the tunnel actually has very little water on it - it's mostly filled with mud!!

And finally, just a picture of what was a parking lot and there's the Boulder Creek Path out there somewhere!!

As a reference - here's an overview map of where I took the pictures:

Image via Google Maps

It's Thursday and it doesn't seem like the water levels have changed any, maybe an inch or two, it's hard to tell.  The part that always amazes me when I walk over there is the sound - it's always surprising to me for some reason that it SOUNDS like a loud river...which duh, it is a river right now, it's just an unexpected sound coming from those areas.  I don't think I'll be out walking on the path for a while!