FLOOD02918

• County: Denver
• Community: Denver
• Stream Name: South Platte River
• Basin: South Platte
• Title: Estimation of Flood Depth-Damage Curves for Residential, Commercial and Industrial Properties in the Denver Region
• Date: 10/1/1977
• Prepared For: CWCB
• Prepared By: Wayne J. Grahm ‎(Master of Science Candidate at CSU)‎
• Floodplain - Doc Type: Educational/Technical/Reference Information

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Actual damages are not known until weeks or months after flood events when

the full and actual impacts can be determined. 4) Sometimes the damages

reported will be stated so as to sell newspapers. 5) It sometimes is not

known whether the estimates include only direct damage to structure and

contents or if they also include other direct damages and indirect and

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secondary damages. 6) Damages are generally not comparable from oneflood

event to the next because of the different sources reporters obtain damage

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estimates from.

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Weather Bureau Data

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Climatological data annual summaries and where necessary, monthly

summaries for the State of Colorado were researched from 1914 to the present

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time in order to obtain actual flood damage estimates. As reporting flood

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losses is not the Weather Bureau's primary function, the reports for Denver

area flooding, were found to be brief and incomplete and in many cases, no

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damage estimates were given at all. It is interesting to note that the

Weather Bureau reported losses approximately nine times as large as the Corps

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of Engineers for the 1933 Bear Creek flood (1933 Weather Bureau Annual Summary,

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Colorado Section & House Document 1/356, 78th Congress, 1st Session). Listedon

,page 73

are the damage estimates obtained from Weather Bureau publications

from which the estimate was obtained. The list is inclusive of all Denver

area flooding to be found in Weather Bureau publications for which damage es-

timates for the Denver area, rather than state as a whole, were given.

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