PALMER LAKE — Rodger Voelker had to stop work early. June 16, 1965, was turning out to be another washout — the latest in a string of them.
The 26-year-old bricklayer left his job site in Colorado Springs and returned home in Palmer Lake. He got back to building a butcher table. Upstairs, his wife, Judy, was baking bread.
The day had started off nice enough, but by early afternoon …
“It just got real dark, and I looked out the front window and saw things flying,” recalled Judy, now 74. “Then the roof started coming off like a roll-top desk.”
Judy scrambled to the garage to find her husband.
“She comes in screaming, ‘The house is gone. The house is gone,’ ” said Rodger, who with his wife had moved to Palmer Lake from Wisconsin just two months earlier.
The freak tornado that had just ripped through the Voelkers’ house was but one wild element in an even wilder confluence of weather phenomena that hit Colorado 50 years ago this week.
The Flood of 1965 killed 21 and injured more than 600 over its four-day rampage, starting June 14. While it wasn’t the deadliest flood in Colorado’s history — t he Big Thompson Flood of 1976 claimed 143 lives — it was probably the most damaging and most widespread, impacting two major watersheds across 15 counties.
Epic hail pounded the state and severe thunderstorms lit up the skies. Additional tornadoes touched down in Loveland, injuring 19 and causing a half-million dollars in damage in the city.
But most unforgettable was the rain. Up to 14 inches dumped on several spots south of Castle Rock in just a matter of hours on the afternoon of June 16 — swelling rivers and tributaries over their banks and into people’s cars, homes and businesses.
The South Platte River through Denver, usually flowing at no more than 800 cubic feet per second in June, gushed at more than 40,000 cfs.
On the Eastern Plains, the rush of water was even more dramatic. The usually trickling Bijou Creek morphed into an almost incomprehensible monster — measuring a whopping 466,000 cfs at Wiggins and stretching 2 miles wide as it hurtled toward the South Platte.
All told, the Flood of 1965 destroyed or damaged more than 5,000 homes, trailers and farm buildings, and about 6,700 small businesses, leaving in its wake $543 million in damages (which would translate to nearly $4.1 billion today).
“I would definitely put it in the top three worst natural disasters in Colorado,” said Tom Browning, deputy director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
Then-Gov. John Love called a special July session of the Colorado General Assembly to temporarily raise the gas tax to help cover the cost of repairs to flood-damaged roads. The rushing waters had taken out 16 bridges in Denver alone.
But out of the misery and destruction of mid-June 1965, important lessons were learned that have changed Coloradans’ relationship with their rivers and waterways.
By the mid-1960s, the South Platte River through Denver and its suburbs had become nothing less than an open sewer and dumping ground, lined by factories, junkyards and landfills.
“Back then, stormwater was ignored as development came in — it was treated as a nuisance,” said Paul Hindman, executive director of the Urban Drainage and Flood Control District.
The Flood of 1965 made it plain that neglect of the city’s river would not come without consequences.
“June 16, 1965, was the day the river gave back to Denver what Denver had given to it for 100 years,” said Jeff Shoemaker, executive director of The Greenway Foundation in Denver. “The city couldn’t ignore the river anymore.”
The Urban Drainage and Flood Control District was formed in 1969 to help cities and towns keep their waterways under control. Chatfield Reservoir, a critical catchment basin south of Denver, was built.
Half a century later, floodplains are more respected and rivers are less abused.
“I think that the 1965 floods acted as a huge eye-opener for communities and floodplain managers,” Browning said. “It really started the era of floodplain management in Colorado.”
Moisture-laden pattern
The weather that dominated the spring of 1965 was not unlike the moisture-laden pattern Colorado has seen the past few weeks, according to state climatologist Nolan Doeskin.
An upper-level low pressure system set up over Nevada, drawing into Colorado copious amounts of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. Storm after storm, moving from south to north, unloaded on the Front Range.
Greeley and points east were first up, getting hit with heavy rains and flooding June 14 and 15. Nature turned its wrath to the south on June 17, sending walls of water down the Arkansas River and putting Eastern Plains communities such as Lamar and Holly under 4 feet of water.
In between, Denver and its suburbs along the South Platte saw their normally placid waterway turn into a churning, brown cascade of mud, water and debris. The unprecedented rainfall south of Castle Rock swelled Plum and Cherry creeks, two tributaries of the South Platte.
Everything from cars to propane tanks to livestock were caught up in the torrent and sent downstream. The Cherry Creek Dam absorbed the excess flow coming from the southeast, but the unbridled South Platte River — before the arrival of Chatfield Dam — had nothing to do but run.
Jack Whiting heard about a wall of water headed to Littleton on the radio. On summer break, the Littleton High School teacher went to a friend’s house and — from the rooftop and with a glass of wine in his hand — watched the river flow.
It didn’t take long for trouble to arrive.
“Looking left to right, suddenly the Platte Valley was all water,” he said. “It was so wide.”
The flood crest lasted about an hour, and in that time, Whiting saw trailers floating past and three to four houses in nearby Columbine Valley pushed off their foundations and sent toward Denver. He mostly remembers the distinct scent in the air.
“It smelled like soil,” Whiting said.
Littleton was hit hard
Littleton, Denver’s southernmost suburb at the time, was hard hit. The South Platte crested 25 feet above normal and carried 40 times the river’s typical flow through the city.
Columbine Country Club was destroyed, and Littleton’s well-water system was badly damaged. A large portion of the longtime Centennial Race Track was turned into splinters and mud puddles.
Dr. G. Marvin Beeman was called in to help save as many horses as possible. The large-animal veterinarian, who at 82 still practices in Littleton today, found himself in a junkyard downriver attending to a mare that had been swept out of her stable.
He ended up pumping 8 gallons of fetid floodwater out of the animal in an effort to save her.
“The pressure of that water went right through the wounds and forced itself right underneath her skin,” Beeman said. “It was a terrible sight to see.”
The mare was one of more than two dozen horses from the racetrack to perish in the flood. The track itself was barely recognizable after the South Platte had settled back into its channel, Beeman said.
The destruction repeated itself through Englewood, Denver and out the other side of the metro area as the turgid South Platte pushed toward Nebraska.
Sterling and La Junta were buried by flood crests 30 feet high and battered by peak flows of 100,000 cfs.
As Colorado drained out over the next few days, thousands of Coloradans took on the daunting task of digging, dredging and cleaning from the worst flood on record.
More important, plans began to take root to ensure that the Flood of 1965 was never replicated.
That’s not to say flooding wouldn’t happen again on a large scale — the Big Thompson Flood in 1976 and the devastation of September 2013 made that clear — but damage from such events might better be mitigated, said Urban Drainage’s Hindman.
“1965 was absolutely the turning point in how Denver managed its rivers and tributaries,” he said.
And that management, according to state historian Bill Convery, is what has allowed the South Platte River to flourish as a coveted city asset and a destination for hundreds of thousands of urban dwellers.
“Planning that took place”
“So much of the development along the South Platte today came out of planning that took place in the immediate aftermath of that flood,” Convery said.
Chief among the improvements was construction of Chatfield Dam. Work on the 147-foot-tall structure began in 1967 and took eight years.
Most experts agree that had the dam been in place in 1965, downstream communities would have largely been spared the worst of the flooding.
Larry Borger, former city manager for Littleton, credits Chatfield Dam for almost single-handedly paving the way for riverside development in Denver and surrounding cities over the years.
“Without the Chatfield Dam, there’s no way all these condos and buildings in LoDo could have been built,” he said.
Even so, there was a desire to look at “nonstructural” ways of dealing with flooding as well. Perhaps the best example of that more natural approach came from Littleton itself.
Borger was city manager in 1970 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began putting in place plans to construct a channel for the South Platte through the city. But some locals felt that a better way to manage the river in Littleton was to give it the space to flood rather than trying to constrain it with concrete bulwarks.
In 1971, Littleton voters approved a tax to help pay for the creation of South Platte Park, which is now an 880-acre park along 2½ miles of the river’s floodplain. But the election would not be sufficient to convince the Corps to drop its channelization plans — the federal law on flood-mitigation funding would first have to be changed.
Littleton sent a delegation to Washington, D.C., to lobby, and in 1974 Congress passed the Water Resource Development Act. With a $400,000 contribution from Littleton, land along the river was purchased in chunks. The park was formally dedicated in 1983.
“It was a national model,” Borger said.
Shoemaker, with The Greenway Foundation, said flood-mitigation efforts through the creation of parks and green spaces continued downriver. Confluence Park and $500 million worth of other investments along the river since 1974 have resulted in 100 miles of trails and 100 acres of parks, he said, allowing a kayaker to float the South Platte from C-470 to Weld County without interruption.
But the flood-control efforts of the past 50 years don’t mean Colorado can rest easy.
Rivers have jumped their banks and claimed lives in just the past couple of years. The right conditions at the absolutely wrong time can still wreak havoc on a state that has seen no shortage of natural disasters through the years — be they blizzards, fires or floods.
And therein, state historian Convery said, lies the real lesson of 1965.
“It reminded us that we never really conquer nature in Colorado or in the West,” he said. “We just negotiate with it.”
John Aguilar: 303-954-1695, jaguilar@denverpost.com or twitter.com/abuvthefold
Commemoration events
Tuesday, 7 p.m.: “Remembering the 1965 South Platte Flood” will take place at History Colorado Center, 1200 Broadway, Denver. Several agencies will discuss the science and impact of the 1965 flood.
Tuesday, 6:30 p.m.: Community event at Aspen Grove Lifestyle Shopping Center, 7301 S. Santa Fe Drive, Littleton. South Platte Park will feature hayrides, a guided hike, birds of prey, an interactive river table and an outdoor film.
Saturday, 7:30 p.m.: “Fifty Years Ago: Stories of the Flood that Changed a Region” will be held at
Bear Creek Lake Park, 15600 W. Morrison Road, Lakewood. Go back in time with campfire stories from that incredible episode, which led to the creation of Bear Creek Lake Park.
