Cleanup underway in Manitou Springs after Wednesday’s flash flooding
Scott Harrison
MANITOU SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) — With the possibility of more rain on Thursday, town crews got busy cleaning up mud and other debris left behind from Wednesday afternoon’s storm and flash flooding.
The biggest mess was reddish-brown mud on El Paso Boulevard in front of Memorial Park.
A street sweeper removed large sections of mud, while a single worker scraped up smaller accumulations with a shovel and dumped them into a plastic barrel.
Other debris could be seen at the Manitou Avenue/Pawnee Avenue intersection, the parking lot in front of the police and fire stations, and in front of the coin laundry near City Hall.
The mess was a surprise to an Illinois family spending their vacation in the area.
“We were hiking in Woodland Park yesterday and just missed (the storm),” said Lori Haenitsch. “We noticed the red dirt and wondered where it was from. But it’s still beautiful here. The mud is kind of pretty.”
Some town residents said that they heard the emergency siren and flash flood warning for the first time.
Aimee Theelen said that she covered her garden to protect it from hail before walking downtown to see the storm’s aftermath.
‘I saw a lot of people running from the arcade,” she recalled. “They ran because it was really cold and they were soaked.”
Several witnesses reported that the audio flash flood warning, issued from the town’s public address system, was too loud and made it difficult for people to understand the message clearly.
Stella Kutschara, a neighbor, agrees.
“If you stayed inside, it was definitely garbled,” she said. “But if you went outside, you kinda had to pause, and you could hear it over all the noise. It was intense!”
An RV park that was evacuated during the storm appeared to be back to normal operations Thursday, with no sign of flood damage.
Some neighbors said that it was the worst flooding they’d seen in the town since the heavy rainstorms that followed the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire.
Since then, vegetation on the fire’s burn scar has regrown and soaks up more rainfall.
Local officials also invested millions of dollars in flood mitigation to slow the flow of runoff during storms.
The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) installed a dozen closure gates along US 24 in Ute Pass to make it easier to close certain highway segments during a flash flood, and avoid closing the entire highway for hours at a time — as was the case immediately after the fire.