Mountain snow and rain on the plains swelled Colorado rivers but probably didn’t play a role in Monday’s failure of a Pueblo levee.
The levee on Fountain Creek was breached about 8:30 a.m. when a 100-foot hole developed, sending half the creek’s flow into a shallow basin with 15 homes and businesses.
Firefighters evacuated homes as about 6 feet of water filled in the 50-acre basin north of the city near a Wal-Mart shopping center, according to Pueblo Fire Department spokesman Woody Percival.
State water officials say the breach was not caused by excessive flow, which reached about 5,000 cubic feet per second early Monday.
“That wasn’t particularly because of excessively high water; it undoubtedly had other problems,” said Jack Byers, deputy state engineer with the Colorado Division of Water Resources.
Swollen rivers around the state are common this time of year but have not been occurring during drought years, Byers said.
“We just haven’t seen this since 1999,” he said. “We haven’t had the snowpack.”
In Denver, the South Platte River reached a flow of about 5,000 cfs early Monday from the surge of stormwater and snowmelt.
The historic average for that date is just under 1,000 cfs, according to state records.
