'We never really have recuperated'

By M.E. Sprengelmeyer
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

Bea Lowell remembers the black clouds filling like water balloons, looming over the Douglas County range and storing up their rage.

"It had clouded up every day for two weeks, but it hadn't rained," she said. "There was rain gathering, and it just wasn't coming down."

Suddenly, on the afternoon of June 16, 1965, the skies dumped everything they had.

"It's like if you break a water balloon over an anthill, it's going to tear it up pretty good," she said.

Fourteen inches of torrential rain near Larkspur sent a violent wall of water -- 20 feet high in some places -- up Plum Creek and into the South Platte River, wiping out bridges, roads and homes as it tore through the Denver area.

Colorado has suffered catastrophic floods ever since settlers began pouring in during the gold rush of 1858-59. Much of the fledgling frontier town of Denver was wiped out by the Cherry Creek flood of 1864. And a flash flood along the Big Thompson River canyon near Loveland killed 145 people in 1976, the worst natural disaster in state history.

But perhaps no flood had a bigger long-term legacy than the flood of 1965. The destruction it wrought in a major metropolitan area just 34 years ago prompted community leaders to do all they could to minimize the potential for such disasters in the future.

The flood of 1965 left six people dead, caused about $530 million in damage in 1998 dollars and spurred construction of the Chatfield Dam to control flows in the South Platte.

"I guess it had everybody keyed up to how nature can act and how we need to do something to tame it," said retired attorney Richard Dittemore, 81, who served on the "Dam the Platte" committee.

The 1965 flood also changed families like Lovell's forever.

"We were in a state of shock for at least a year," said Lowell, now 74 and still living on the family's ranch south of Castle Rock. "We had people come in and say, 'It's going to take you 30 years to recuperate from it.' I just realized, we never really have recuperated from it."

The worst of the storm hit about five miles south near Larkspur and Palmer Lake.

Jodie Watkins, now 67, was in her house when she heard windows breaking upstairs.

"I could feel the pressure in the house," she said. "I looked out the window and could see this greenish, blackish cloud coming from the north down. You could feel the horrible wind and rain, so I grabbed the baby and rushed to the basement.

"You couldn't even begin to imagine that amount of water. It was just walls of water. It was unbelievable how it completely changed the look of the mountain."

Water and mud poured into homes, then roared into the maze of creeks that twist through southern Douglas County. A wall of water moved north, building pressure from debris that blocked its way like a crimp in a garden hose.

South of Castle Rock, the Lowell Ranch was hit from above and below.

East Plum Creek overflowed its banks and turned the family's pastures into a rising lake.

Bea Lowell's son Jim, then 15, defied his worried father and rushed to the barn, hoping to save their sheep and his prized 4-H calf.

The sheep went swimming as waters rose above waist level. Lowell clung to his 700-pound calf and tried to lead him to safety. But just outside the barn, the waters rose to more than six feet deep, and he had to let go.

He climbed to the roof of the barn, then hung onto the silo for dear life. The calf was later found dead in the Chatfield area, more than a dozen miles away.

"I was devastated, totally devastated," said Lowell, now 50 and a stone mason in Montana. "Later, we had a family meeting to decide if we should let it go or rebuild. We stayed. That's our home. My dad was born in that house."

The water kept moving north. In Castle Rock, it wiped out a bridge on Main Street.

Duane Knox was in Fort Collins, watching television coverage of the disaster when he suddenly realized that his family's mobile home was built in the shadow of that bridge.

"As I walked the creek a day or two afterwards, all I found were carcasses: a hog and a horse," said Knox, 62, a retired educator. "I walked halfway to Sedalia. It had just flushed everything down. ... There was nothing to be found."

As the flood moved toward Denver, police ordered families near the South Platte to evacuate.

"My mom grabbed our little chihuahua, Dewey, and some papers, and that's all we got," said Judy Blevins, who was 6 at the time and living on Nevada Place near West Alameda Avenue and the South Platte.

The flood swept away several homes on the street and knocked Blevins' house nearly off its foundation. Everything inside was ruined, including two ornate doll houses that Blevins and her sister, Bonnie, had cherished.

"I love you, mother and father," Blevins later wrote in a note tacked to her mother's pillow. "And I am sorry that the house got washed away. And nobody can fix up our dollhouses like they were. And nobody can fix up the house like it was. Not even God."

Though the family repaired the home, the Valverde neighborhood would never be the same.

"It was sad for the community because a lot of people didn't come back," Blevins said. "The flood brought the neighborhood down. It made it more industrial."

Almost 1,400 families sought disaster relief. The flood damaged 1,270 structures, including 600 homes in Denver alone. It inundated factories along the South Platte and knocked out so many bridges that thousands of workers were kept from their jobs for days.

And it finally prompted Congress to provide funding for the Chatfield Dam, which had been planned since the 1930s and officially authorized in 1949.

Dittemore said the flood had some positive effects. Local governments bought some low-lying land in flood plains and turned it into parks and open space. Flood damage also spurred revitalization of washed-out industrial areas.

"The destructive forces were also constructive forces," he said.

More than three decades later, however, Bea Lowell looks at the rampant construction along untamed creeks throughout Douglas County and wonders whether a disaster could happen again.

"Each generation has to learn the same mistakes all over again," she said. "I guess that's human nature."

Colorado Milestones, which appears Tuesdays, is part of a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society. Digital and print copies of historical images available at the Colorado Historical Society, (303) 866-2305.

On TV: Sunday at 10 p.m.: Colorado History: From our rivers to our kitchen taps, the history of water use in the state.

December 14, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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