After a mostly dry Saturday it’s raining again in Colorado, where since Tuesday we've had record precipitation and flooding. It was drizzly when I first got up Sunday morning, but when it tapered off I went out to inspect a collapsed bridge.
When a tornado hits the cliche is to say a place looks like a war zone. Well, this looks like the aftermath of an earthquake. Let’s give this imaginary tremblor a 7.0 on the Richter scale.
This bridge is over the ordinarily mild-mannered Coal Creek. It's typically fifteen to twenty feet in its widest places. Now an adjacent field is totally flooded; and where the creek usually meanders by, there is a newly-formed cataract – the author of the collapsed bridge.
Once I had enough pictures I went back to the legal side of the barricade. A cop came along. I waved at him and he waved back. A few other people were down near the collapsed bridge. The cop didn’t get out of his car, but did pick up a microphone and speak through a loudspeaker:
“You’re in a restricted area; please vacate!”
After I got home the rain resumed. And it intensified. We can’t take a whole lot more down here in the flatlands. But if it rains heavily in the mountains again, well...that could touch off renewed walls of water surging down on us. And that would not be good.
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