LYONS — The people of Lyons believe they will be skipping one phase of the well-documented, predictable stages of disaster recovery.
The “disillusionment stage” should be here about now, bringing with it resentment, hostility and bickering among neighbors unevenly affected by September’s floods.
In this town of about 2,000 — and among the 1,500 more in “the greater Lyons area” — about 150 households lost nearly everything when the raging North and South St. Vrain creeks came together to tear out the heart of Lyons early Sept. 12.
One man died in the mayhem. The mayor estimates Lyons lost a fifth of its housing stock.
Half a dozen businesses — restaurants, a retailer and a bank — have closed, either damaged by the flood or unable to rally during the two months when no one could reach Lyons. The flood took out all of Lyons’ core utilities — gas, electricity, water, sewer, Internet, telephone, cell signal.
Like many northern Colorado communities, the river gave Lyons its character, identity and livelihood, and then the river almost took it all away.
Ledgers are filled with known losses in flood-ruined places — Jamestown, Drake, Glen Haven, Milliken, Evans, Kersey. Temporary fixes have been made, but communities across Boulder, Larimer and Weld counties still are wrangling with how close they can — or should — get to the rivers again and who will foot the restoration bills.
With the hard decisions and heavy lifting of physical recovery of infrastructure and housing about to begin in Lyons, town meetings have been scheduled through February to determine what it can restore and what it might yet become.
“We need to make it harder for future generations to get this hurt again,” Mayor Julie Van Domelen said.
Townspeople describe Lyons as looking like a war zone.
“It was like a nuclear bomb went off in our town,” said Kelle Dinneen, 45, a practitioner of sacred body work and light and sound therapy. “People were just in a state of shock that Thursday. They were riding their bicycles around with their little children as the creek banks were sloughing away alongside them.”
Patrick Michael Tovani, 75, said he has survived a harrowing motorcycle accident and a stroke that partially paralyzed him and robbed him of his livelihood.
“The flood was the worst,” he said. Everyone and everything around him was in crisis.
“Lived in 15-minute intervals”
An initial disaster, traumatic as it is, is quickly followed by the “heroic” and “honeymoon” stages of disasters, when lives are saved, rescues and evacuations carried out, and bonds forged as residents pull together to survive, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“For a long time, we lived life in 15-minute intervals,” Van Domelen said. “We’re done with the ‘Our pants are on fire’ stage. We’re in the ‘What the heck is going on?’ stage.”
It’s in these later weeks that fracture lines begin to appear in community cohesion, the HHS model predicts.
Once disaster victims have had time to make an inventory of what they’ve really lost, they begin to recognize the limits of disaster assistance, HHS reports. They will not be fully restored. They are exhausted. Financial pressures and other stresses have mounted. Relief agencies have pulled out. Unrealistic optimism fades to discouragement and hostility.
Those hardest hit look around and see that life has returned to near normal for many, but not for them. Honeymoon over.
That’s sounds partly right, say many residents, including Van Domelen. Townspeople readily admit to disillusionment with the red tape wrapped around government assistance. They allow they are experiencing disappointment, frustration, upset and confusion.
What townspeople won’t admit is that they harbor ill will toward one another.
“A few are starting to feel more pessimistic,” said Daniel Rodriguez, a 32-year-old musician with the folk group Elephant Revival. “People are getting lost in the bureaucratic B.S. We all have these question marks on our foreheads.
“But everybody has each other’s backs,” he said.
Sure, in response to the myriad stresses, townspeople are grumbling, Van Domelen said. And they are not above “playing the flood card,” a running town joke about invoking the disaster whenever a good excuse is needed — for anything.
“We use the flood card a lot,” she said. “We’re tired, slightly irritable, but we’re not knocked down. Everyone is working through it.”
David Tiller, a 26-year-old musician, lost “a nice little house by the river” with a recording studio that he and wife Enion owned outright with their 5-year-old son, Aesop. Together, the couple perform and tour as Taarka.
They saved some musical instruments and equipment from the rising waters, but not all. The family had no flood insurance, and their homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover flood damage. A $30,000 payment from the Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn’t begin to make them whole.
“The community has been handling the whole thing really well,” Tiller said. “Like the bumper sticker says: ‘Lyons Strong.’ It’s a curative element.”
Then again, this is a town that, when divided by floodwaters into six islands and completely isolated from the outside world, threw itself a party at a coffeehouse and cafe on High Street.
The flood had killed power. Perishable foods were perishing. The creeks were still rampaging out of their banks, and roads had crumbled away. There was nothing to do but eat up.
“Everyone gathered at The Stone Cup and barbecued everyone’s meat,” Dinneen said. “We ate every spoonful of ice cream in town. There was everything you could imagine to eat.”
Future meals were uncertain. That night, Dinneen said, it was a level, if underwater, playing field.
“It was much more obvious that, in important ways, we’re all alike,” Dinneen said. “There was a helluva lot of compassion.”
The town would be nearly empty by the end of that first post-flood weekend. It wasn’t until Thanksgiving that about 80 percent of the town would be back.
“At first, no one was unscathed,” said Van Domelen, who lived for weeks in an RV parked in her sister’s driveway in Boulder. “Coming back, it’s been hard to celebrate the homecoming when you know 150 households aren’t back. We want them back.”
Several people observed that many of Lyons’ hardest-hit residents also seem to be those with the least personal resources.
“Even people who didn’t lose anything have this guilt because some of their friends lost everything,” Dinneen said. “We’re still in the stage of feeling like we’re skating on marbles. I’m still looking for housing. Some people have moved three, four, five times already.”
Lack of available land for residential development is a looming problem.
Kristin Johansen, 27, a contract engineer who lives in Hygiene, said every temporary emergency measure has been taken to restore water and sewer service to Lyons. Yet everything will have to be redone to create long-term infrastructure once planners have updated floodplain data.
“There are still a few places where we’re still trying to turn the lights on,” Van Domelen said. “But it’s easy for the town to get things done. What is challenging is knowing all the (funding) rules.”
Lyons is one of the Colorado towns eligible to apply for a portion of a $63 million Community Development Block Grant for disaster recovery announced in early December by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
If mastering the rules challenges Van Domelen, that’s saying something. She was a senior economist with the World Bank for 20 years. She worked in economic development in the poorest countries. She still does consulting work and was on business in Tanzania when the flood hit Lyons.
FEMA assistance
With a flood-repair bill of about $50 million, Lyons has estimated that its share — after FEMA pays 75 percent and the state pays 12.5 percent — will be more than $6 million. Lyons has, in all its accounts and reserves, about $4 million.
People have made private donations to aid individuals trying to recover from the deluge. On Dec. 20, about $950,000 contributed by more than 800 donors to the Rebuild Lyons — One Life at a Time fund was distributed in grants no larger than $5,000.
And there are ways the flood has made life in Lyons better. Xcel Energy buried its electric lines 20 feet below ground, so those won’t be affected again, Van Domelen said. The town now also has much improved Internet access, she said.
Until September, Van Domelen said, Lyons was a success story. Its Main Street renovation had helped sales-tax revenue climb after it tanked — down 20 percent — early in the recession.
“We dug ourselves out of that,” Van Domelen said.
But Lyons lost two months of sales-tax revenue during the important fall tourism season. And with much of its housing stock destroyed, property taxes will be down, too.
In Lyons, 211 residential structures suffered some level of damage, Van Domelen said. Forty-three mobile homes are gone and 168 stick-built homes were damaged. Of those houses, about 50 to 60 had flooded basements or slightly worse damage. More than 100 homes suffered much worse damage.
For those who didn’t live along the creeks, there is still the shock of an unrecognizable landscape. A verdant, lazy river corridor became a wide chaotic plain buried up to 9 feet in sediment and tons of cobble. Large sections of once-lush banks are gone, along with footbridges and countless trees.
“All these big, old, gorgeous trees we had were swept away,” Dinneen said. “I had a relationship with those trees. They’re all gone.”
Along with affordable housing and economic development, restoration of the river corridor, which provides the town’s tourism lifeblood, is one of the biggest challenges facing Lyons.
Parks hit hard
The town’s riverside parks — where it held its signature events, from whitewater kayaking to music festivals — were hammered hard. Also obliterated were the Lyons Whitewater Park, near Meadow Park; the Black Bear Hole, where the Lyons Outdoor Games is held; and the A-hole feature.
Still, Van Domelen said, the worst is behind them.
Immediately after the flood, down street after street, there were debris piles 20 feet high — all personal belongings.
“That was the worst,” Van Domelen said. “Those piles are gone. People can see progress.”
Now only a few small scattered piles pop up here and there. Homes are mostly mucked out, but decisions remain to be made about whether to raze houses or raise homes to whatever height will be the new rule for the floodplain.
It’s hard for people to make reasonable decisions with the information they have, Van Domelen said.
“It’s a heartbreaker every time we have to go down there to deal with the house,” Tiller said. “Trees blasted through our walls. There is 3, 4 or 5 feet of mud everywhere. We lost writings and photographs and all the documentation of our life.”
He dug one of Aesop’s toys out of the mud at his son’s request.
Tiller has heard — and is hoping — there will be more funds available for people who lost their homes. Yet, different federal officials say different things about how to qualify for it, he said.
He worries he still could lose his way of life as a musician.
“The worst of the catastrophe is not the short haul,” Tiller said. “It’s the long haul.”
The people of Lyons swear they are in it together.
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276, edraper@denverpost.com or twitter.com/electadraper
Article source: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_24847806/united-town-lyons-salvaging-pride-humor-floods-wake