One reason Angelique Fiorillo moved from Denver to Glenwood Springs in May was to get closer to the mountains, but a heavy rain Tuesday literally brought the mountain a little too close to home.
Shortly before 5 p.m., the precipitation loosened a boulder that bounded down the side of Red Mountain. It blasted through the wall of her second-floor apartment, tumbled through the living room and knocked out another wall before coming to rest in the front yard.
“It shook the whole apartment when it made impact,” Fiorillo said. “It was like a torpedo went through it.”
Fiorillo said the rock went right past the chair where she normally would have been sitting while she watched “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” On Tuesday, she had left her apartment to talk to her neighbors.
“We heard what sounded like firecrackers or gunshots,” she said. “We looked at one another like, ‘That was rocks, wasn’t it?”‘
She said her next thought was for the well-being of her cats, Loki and Odin. She rushed back to the apartment and, after some searching, discovered them safe, though startled from their afternoon naps.
Fiorillo described the boulder as about half the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and said other rocks hit the hood of a truck driving down Midland Avenue but that no one was hurt.
“There was a pretty good-sized one that demolished a toolshed in the back,” she said.
“It’s pretty much nonexistent.”
Fiorillo said her husband, Richard, wasn’t home at the time.
“I called him in hysterics,” she said. “I don’t think he’s really taken it in that I could have been killed.”
For the time being, the couple will be staying at the home of friends in Glenwood Springs after spending Tuesday night with her sister-in- law, Kathy Kneipper.
Although Angelique Fiorillo and the cats are OK and nobody else was hurt, she said she is still shaken by the incident and is in no hurry to move back in.
“Had I been in the apartment, I think I’d be in a coma or be dead,” she said.
“Thank God I wasn’t watching TV.”
Staff writer Michael McCollum can be reached at 303-820-1201 or mmccollum@denverpost.com.
