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<br />9 <br /> <br />flood. John tried very hard to explain why he made the recommendations for <br />returning the road to its present site. Even 20 years after the event, the <br />poignancy of the interaction indicated that the residents and the geologist <br />remembered the moment as if was yesterday. Both spoke from their hearts <br />regarding the disaster and the land use decisions that followed. <br />Howard Gunnarson from the Bureau of Reclamation listened intensely as <br />Theresa Vasquez reported on flash floods in Mexico, including the story of <br />the flooding the same year as the Big Thompson flood (1976) that killed <br />2,000 people. He remarked that the Bureau must take into account how their <br />dams and policies concerning their dams impact our neighbors to the South <br /> <br />Gruntfest <br /> <br />Daunting Questions <br /> <br />Tragically, on July 13, 1996, the day of the symposium field trip, three <br />people were killed in a flash flood on Buffalo Creek in Colorado. The <br />vegetation on the headwater area of Buffalo Creek about 140 miles southwest <br />of the Big Thompson Canyon had been destroyed by a fire two weeks earlier. <br />The lack of vegetation intensified the impacts of the heavy rain. Several <br />homes were washed away in the small drainage and there were no official <br />flash flood warnings in effect before the flood. <br />It wasn't until dawn on August I, 1976, that the world realized that one <br />thunderstorm killed 140 people and destroyed so much property. The next <br />time more than 12 inches of rain falls at the top of a watershed in Colorado, <br />New Mexico, Arizona, West Virginia, or elsewhere, will there be a timely <br />official forecast? Will the campers, motel owners, homeowners, and <br />motorists heed the warnings and do the right thing by climbing to higher <br />ground? <br />And, as we near the end of the 20th century, 20 years after the Big <br />Thompson disaster, will the knowledge of the extraordinary amount of <br />rainfall, the number of people killed, the extent of the destruction be known <br />only the next day as it was on August 1, 1976? <br />