It’s a clear Friday evening in Lyons — the first day of this year’s Rocky Mountain Folks Festival — and a silver-bearded man in a white tank top and ankle-cuffed pants steps on stage.
As the sun falls behind the red sandstone cliffs, onlookers move their camping chairs from the crisp waters of the stage-adjacent North Saint Vrain Creek to dryer spots on the festival lawn where they’ll enjoy the rest of the day’s artists. Kids keep splashing around in the shallows.
The performer is folk artist Kristian Matsson and his band The Tallest Man On Earth. His sharp movements and wit captivate the crowd.
“You bet this mighty river’s both my savior and my sin,” he sings from beneath the wooden Yin-Yang symbol at the crest of the stage.
Whether Matsson knows it or not, those lyrics — about the duality of the river as both a place of refuge and destruction — are all too familiar in this community.
Amid the scene of celebration and music, it’s easy to forget what happened 10 years ago on Sept. 11: the beginning of a multi-day torrential rainstorm that inundated the town with water that filled businesses, took homes and isolated the community for days. Some of the town’s most important cultural venues, like Meadow and Bohn parks, were devastated.
The destruction spread across the Front Range, amounting to more than $4 billion in damage across 17 counties, according to the Colorado Encyclopedia.
In the ensuing decade, Lyons replaced roads, homes, parks and more thanks to herculean efforts from town staff and administration managing a $75 million recovery budget. At the time of the flood, the town’s budget was $1.2 million.
The completion of a pedestrian bridge over North Saint Vrain Creek last October was the final flood-recovery infrastructure project, and symbolized the flip of a tumultuous page in Lyons’ history.
But Hollie Rogin, the town’s mayor, says the recovery still isn’t complete.
“What we haven’t gotten back are the people who had to leave because their homes were destroyed,” she says during a golf-cart tour of town. “So there’s still a lot of heartbreak.”
Some residents returned to their homes or rebuilt after the flood, but others were scattered to surrounding towns or even out of state.
The most affordable areas along the creek, including two mobile home parks, were decimated. That’s where artists, musicians and quarry workers often lived.
“Affordable housing was our biggest loss,” says Victoria Simonsen, the town’s administrator. “We lost about 100 affordable units that night and we’ve only been able to build back 46 so far.”
Lyons has made efforts to bring people back to town for the last decade, perhaps most substantially through the new Lyons Valley Townhome Community, a 40-unit affordable housing development giving move-in priority to people displaced by the flood.
One of those people is Kriya Goodman, a teacher and music therapist who has been trying to get back to Lyons ever since her rental was destroyed in the flood. Now living in Michigan, she says moving into the townhome community this fall will be the first time she had a stable home since 2013.
“It’s beyond my wildest imagination the way it’s turning out,” she says. “It’s so beautiful. I’m going to have my own house. I’ve been moving around so much but I’m so ready to have my own place to really be stable and settled.”
While some say the town has emerged stronger and better since the flood with new infrastructure and more day visitors than ever before, the national trends of rising home prices and virtual workers flocking to small communities leave longtime Lyons residents grappling with the town’s identity.
“We’ve gotta figure out who we want to be and walk the talk,” says Simonsen. “Do we want to be a bedroom community or do we really want to be a true community?”
It came in the night
Everyone in Lyons, a town of around 2,000 people at the time of the disaster, has a story about the flood.
It’s not an exaggeration — the town is only one square mile in size and 20% of its housing was destroyed.
Simonsen, who has served under five mayors over the last 13 years, woke up just before midnight on Sept. 11 to a call that the river was over its banks.
One of her first instincts was to go to Town Hall, where records dating back to the 1800s were stored. Simonsen and two other town employees started pulling the bottom drawer out of every filing cabinet and setting them on tables.
She remembers desperately trying to keep water out of the building, which was already ankle deep.
“Use anything but the American flag to tuck under the doorways and windowsills,” she recalls telling her coworkers.
It was dark and difficult to tell where the water was coming from. In her singular focus to save records, Simonsen lost track of the immediate danger: the water.
“Within minutes of it being ankle deep, we looked up and the water outside the window was about even with my head,” she says. “And oh my god, that was the only time honestly I felt like I might die.”
In a moment of panic, she realized the doors only opened outward. But thanks to some quick thinking, she was able to heave open one of the building’s back doors into knee-high water.
“It was just very surreal. Terrifying,” she says. “You’re in survival mode at that point.”
Simonsen was experiencing a weather anomaly.
Dave Gochis is a hydro-meteorologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) who studies convective thunderstorms over complex terrain and models their hydrologic impacts. He says the 2013 floods were unique.
“The event itself was, statistically speaking, a very rare and extreme event,” he says. “Not only just for some of the local amounts of precipitation that fell in a given watershed, but also the spatial extent of [heavy rainfall] spread across almost three counties.”
According to the National Weather Service, rainfall reached up to 18 inches in parts of Boulder County, with most of the rain falling on Sept. 11 and 12. Record flood levels were observed on the Saint Vrain near Lyons.
When the sun rose the next morning on Sept. 12, Lyons residents realized the town was separated into six distinct islands. The roads coming into town were washed out, leaving no way in or out. But the water was still raging.
“The sound [of the river] was deafening,” Simonsen says, which included hearing landslides and cars hitting bridges. “I can still hear it.”
Simonsen says the next 36 hours were “lawless in Lyons.” She remembers being wet for a couple of days — she didn’t think to grab extra clothes or socks — as the town hunkered down together. Even the homes left unscathed by the flood were cut off from power, telephone service and water.
Outside of Lyons, Mike Chard, the director of the Boulder County Office of Emergency Management, was leading the emergency operations center during the flood. More than 800 people were reported missing the first night and his office evacuated more than 1,700 people across the county by the end of the week.
He says Lyons was “tore up,” and its infrastructure was “bounced back to 1860.” But it was the response from Lyons residents that stood out to him.
“It was remarkable seeing that community hold the line with each other and lean into each other during a time of crisis,” Chard says. “They were an incredible example of human spirit and rising to the occasion.”
Neil Sullivan, co-owner of the St. Vrain Market, says the town banded together when there was no one else to call.
“One of the things that we all realized as a community later on is how vulnerable we are and how quickly we can come together,” he says. “So that was super impressive to see. But it’s too bad we had to go through [the flood] to realize it.”
Simonsen calls the community’s immediate response “absolutely heroic.” That response — filled with resilience and camaraderie — helped guide the next 10 years of rebuilding.
A resident returns
When Sarah Triebold handed over the keys to the first family moving into the Lyons Townhome Community on June 30, there were lots of hugs and happy tears.
Since taking on the project earlier this year, Triebold, property manager of the development, has gotten to know incoming families.
“They are ready to come home,” she says.
Kriya Goodman was just settling into her fourth home in Michigan when she got the call on March 15 that there was a place being built for her in Lyons if she wanted it.
“I was elated, I was jumping for joy,” she says about the call. “I still feel like I’m dreaming. I even called my friend up there to ask if it’s really happening.”
But it’s been a challenging road for her since 2013.
Goodman says she had the job and home of her dreams in Lyons. She lived on Apple Valley Road along North Saint Vrain Creek and taught at the local Montessori school. Her grandson would play in the apple tree near her porch.
In the years following the flood, she bounced around from temporary housing scenarios in the Boulder area and in Michigan, where she grew up. She says she always wanted to be back in Lyons.
Meanwhile, the town was struggling to rebuild after losing a fifth of its housing. In 2015, Lyons residents voted down a plan to build 60 affordable housing units for displaced residents on public park land.
The vote was devastating for Goodman. She says she gave up on moving back.
“I just kind of slunk away thinking I’ll never be able to afford to get back in here,” she says. “That’s why I stopped going up [to Lyons] because it was just too hard for me.”
Connie Sullivan, who was the town’s mayor for two terms following the flood and co-owns the St. Vrain Market with her husband Neil, says affordable housing was a priority, but it was “pretty contentious” because it needed to be rebuilt away from the floodplain in a safer location.
One initiative Connie says has been successful is the establishment of ADUs for long-term rentals, which give working-class residents more living options in town. Neil Sullivan says the business community relies on those housing solutions.
“We hire those folks. They work here,” he says. “They need to get to work and they sometimes can’t find transportation from outside to get here. [Affordable housing is] a real need for this business community to be vibrant and go forward.”
One of the last things Connie did as mayor was give the Lyons Townhome Community project the green light. She calls it her swan song.
“The town didn’t give up on [affordable housing],” she says. “There’s several people that I still talk to that [have] been waiting for 10 years, just surviving wherever they can. And they’re finally getting housing, which is so incredibly rewarding.”
It was only a few years ago, when Goodman was losing hope to live in Lyons, that she met Simonsen on a walking path in town. Simonsen told her the town hadn’t given up on her, and asked if Goodman would share her story at a public town meeting.
So Goodman grabbed her guitar and sang about her pending return to the melody of a familiar John Denver song. She performed it again for Boulder Weekly.
“Take me home, Boulder County roads,” she sings on a FaceTime call. “To the place, I belong, Lyons affordable housing, mountain mama (that’s me), take me home.”
Now there’s finally a road for her to journey home.
‘Resilient and determined’
Lyons may have physically recovered, but the flood continues to impact residents’ psyches.
“People still get nervous when it rains,” says Mayor Rogin.
Simonsen doesn’t go anywhere without an extra pair of socks in her purse.
Reflecting on the last 10 years, Simonsen says she’s learned a lot about the town.
“It tells me that we are resilient and determined, and that we are creative,” she says. “And that we respect nature in a much different way than we did. And that [the town] was worth putting back.”
The Lyons Valley Townhome Community is scheduled for completion at the end of November, but that timeline could change due to potential construction delays. Three families have already moved in, with more coming this month.
Goodman expects to move into her new townhome in October.
“I feel like we are rebuilding the community that Lyons was revolving around.”
The project’s motto, created by Triebold and town staff, is fitting for a community finding the final pieces to its decade-long flood-recovery puzzle: “We’re not home until we’re all home.”
Flood Anniversary Events
Remember the flood and celebrate how far we’ve come a decade later at these Boulder County events. To start, check out an interactive website about the flood created through a collaboration between Boulder County, the cities of Longmont, Boulder and Louisville, the towns of Erie, Lyons and Superior, and the Carnegie Library for Local History.
• Flood Commemoration Tour. Various times, Saturday, Sept. 16
• Crisis to Camaraderie: The 2013 Flood Photo Exhibit. 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 14, Longmont Museum, 400 Quail Road
• Motus Playback Improv Theatre’s “Stories Of The Flood.” 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 14, Longmont Museum’s Stewart Auditorium, 400 Quail Road
• 2013 Flood Commemoration Story Circle. 6-8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 12, Carnegie Library for Local History,
1125 Pine St.
• Community members are invited to share audio clips, art, sculpture or any other media that express experiences from the flood with the City.
• Open mic for stories, poems and songs. 6-7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 9, Moxie Bread Co., 442 High St.
• Official Remembrance Ceremony.
11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 10, Sandstone Park
• Town-wide exhibits and displays.
12:30-4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 10
• Silver Linings Tour. 12:30-4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 10
• Community gathering with live music and a dance performance. 3-7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 10, LaVern M. Johnson Park
• Candlelight Vigil. 6:30-8:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 11, Confluence Circle, 4th Avenue and Prospect Street
