Nearly a year’s worth of precipitation pounded the state in less than a week, causing a��

Nine people died, more than 1,800 homes were lost, almost 500 miles of roads were shut down and more than 1,000 people had to be rescued and evacuated by helicopter.��More than 17 inches of rainfall cut��access to entire communities including Jamestown, Lyons and Estes Park.

The flood re-shaped entire towns and neighborhoods, displacing thousands of Coloradans and prompting upward of��$2 billion in federal, state and local money��allocated toward recovery efforts.

Denver’s average temperature in August was 1.3 degrees above normal, according to , and the city saw less than an inch of rain with only seven days of measurable rainfall.

Meteorologists at the NWS said a similar pattern is likely to happen in September as well.

“General warmer and drier weather,” NWS Boulder meteorologist David Barjenbruck said of September’s outlook. “That’s typically what we’ve seen over the last few years. We get these drier fall patterns, and they stick around for a while.”

That’s not to say the whole month will be hot and dry.

Labor Day weekend will be hot with highs pushing into the 90s through Sunday, then some cooling expected by Monday. There will be a chance of just a brief storm or two spreading into the lower elevations Sunday and Monday afternoons.

— NWS Boulder (@NWSBoulder)

The first full week of September will see a drop in temperatures after Labor Day weekend’s near-record highs, even getting to a near-seasonal norm Tuesday with a high of 82 degrees. A few scattered storms coming off the mountains are also possible on Sunday and Monday.

That won’t last long though, Barjenbruck said, as the second week of September will warm back up above normal.

“The shows above-normal temperatures (are) pretty certain,” Barjenbruck said.

Inversely, the 8-to-14-day outlook for precipitation shows below-normal levels into the second week of September.

Past the 14-day mark, Barjenbruck said, it gets a little more difficult to predict patterns with the same amount of confidence, but temperature and precipitation levels are generally expected to stay the same throughout the month.

Noting that the 10-year anniversary of the historic 2013 floods in Boulder County is this month, Barjenbruck said a wetter weather pattern in September isn’t out of the question later this month; it just isn’t likely.

“There are occurrences when we do get into wet weather patterns,” he said. “They can be in September, but this year’s looks like we’re going to be fairly dry, at least through the first half (of the month). We’ll see where it goes from there.”

It was 2013 and the North St. Vrain River — swollen angry with too much water in too little time — hurled boulders, propane tanks and tree limbs into Lyons on a dark September night. A pedestrian bridge just upstream became unmoored from its foundations and swiveled hard into Hubbard’s black walnut tree, catching there and forming an unwanted diversion dam.

“When it did that, it re-routed the river right into the house,” said Hubbard, now 72.

From there, mud, silt and debris poured into the home she’d owned since 1981, sending Hubbard and hundreds of her fellow residents in Lyons packing for higher ground. Just a few blocks away, Donna Boone watched the water rise and rise that same September night from inside her trailer at the Riverbend Mobile Home Park.

“When I started loading the car, the water was up to my ankles,” she said. “When I was finished loading the car, it was up to my knees.”

While the same raging river hit both homes with the same destructive force nearly 8 1/2 years ago, what happened next to Boone and Hubbard couldn’t have been more different. Boone now lives in Loveland, with no plans to return to the town she called home for 36 years. Hubbard is back in her 4th Avenue house, rebuilt bigger and elevated nearly five feet off the ground.

“I owned the land, I’d been there a long time,” she said. “I wanted to rebuild and be back home.”

The choices the two women made following the 2013 Colorado floods will be echoed over the coming months — and years — by the nearly 1,100 families in and around Louisville and Superior who lost their homes to the Marshall fire on Dec. 30.

Build or walk away, pull out stakes or dig in deeper, stay or go. Andy Rumbach, a professor at Texas A&M University and a faculty fellow at the school’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, worked closely with flood survivors in Lyons when he was teaching at the University of Colorado Denver.

“For a lot of folks, they want to be a part of their community — they want to plug back into their networks,” he said.

There’s no neat plug-in formula to determine who rebuilds and who moves on after a natural disaster, Rumbach said. That decision depends on a multitude of factors that vary with every person impacted — the level of insurance coverage in force, the cost to rebuild, proximity to retirement age and the sense of belonging within a community.

But many in Boulder County will fight the red tape and endure the delays to put their lives back together right where they were before, Rumbach said.

“There’s a stickiness to place,” he said.

Flood turned Lyons “richer”

The 2013 flood destroyed or damaged approximately 200 homes in Lyons — or about 20% of the housing stock in the town of 2,000. The town’s infrastructure and utilities sustained around $75 million in damage from the rushing waters of both the north and south forks of the St. Vrain River, which come together in what turned out to be a devastating confluence at the west end of town.

More notable was the flood’s impact to Lyons’ already constrained supply of affordable housing. Because the mode of disaster was water rather than fire, the Federal Emergency Management Agency bought up dozens of lots in the town’s floodway and placed them off limits to future habitation.

That included two low-lying mobile home parks with 50 homes between them.

“We did lose nearly 100% of our affordable housing,” said Lyons Town Administrator Victoria Simonsen, who’s been in the position for more than a decade. “And what it’s done is totally gentrify the community and not allow anyone in who needs affordable housing.”

Median home prices in Lyons, she said, have leaped from around $350,000 in 2013 to more than $800,000 today.

For Boone, 76, returning to Lyons wasn’t an option once her trailer was totaled by the flood. Not only would Riverbend Mobile Home Park soon be no more, but home prices were on an inexorable rise across the entire region. The former hairdresser used FEMA funds to settle in a mobile home park in Loveland.

“I couldn’t afford to live there anymore,” Boone said. “It feels more like Boulder today than Lyons. It doesn’t feel like home anymore.”

Rumbach, at Texas A&M, said Lyons became “less diverse” and “richer” in the wake of the flood. That’s evident to Simonsen, who said she ran into three families over the holidays who had just moved to town from New York City. And the steady list of utility shutoffs she used to receive on a monthly basis has shrunk to just a handful.

“That’s telling me we don’t have people having needs in that area,” Simonsen said.

Hubbard, who waited five years to rebuild her home in the confluence area of town, said there’s been “an influx of people” into Lyons in recent years.

“The people who are coming in want to Boulder-fy Lyons,” she said, noting her distaste for a . “Things that used to be on Main Street are there no more.”

Only now is affordable housing set to go up in Lyons — a 40-unit project off of Carter Drive. It comes nearly seven years after in Bohn Park for replacement, low-cost housing after the flood.

Lori Peek, a University of Colorado at Boulder sociology professor and director of the university’s Natural Hazards Center, said natural disasters have the greatest impact on the poor, people of color, single mothers, people with disabilities and renters.

“What we have seen in disaster after disaster, those who were most vulnerable at the time of the disaster experience the most complicated and protracted recovery processes,” she said.

Sixteen years after Hurricane Katrina, Peek said New Orleans still has 25% fewer residents than it had before the storm and those who remain are more likely to be white and more likely to be homeowners than renters. While the neighborhoods destroyed by the Marshall fire didn’t face anywhere near the socioeconomic challenges that the Crescent City faced before Hurricane Katrina hit, that doesn’t mean there won’t be residents of Louisville and Superior facing pressure to leave.

“Even people who are insured, they often struggle with disasters because they may soon learn they are underinsured or not insured for the disaster that happened to them,” Peek said. “Sometimes people end up giving up.”

Recovery isn’t made any easier by the seemingly endless rise in home prices along the Front Range. Seattle-based Zillow is calling for a 17.5% gain in metro Denver home values over the next 12 months, which comes on top of a record-setting 22.1% gain in 2021, according to the company.

“You can look at the real estate prices from 2013 and now in Lyons and the prices have tripled,” said Scott Kelly, who moved to Loveland after the flood took out his home in Lyons.

Kelly hasn’t completely left Lyons in the rearview mirror. He still runs his Gateway Auto Service shop on 5th Avenue in town but he said Lyons didn’t feel the same after 2013.

“It’s changed,” he said.

“Every reason to be hopeful”

Suzanna Long, an engineering professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology who studies natural disasters, said a major part of recovery has little to do with insurance coverage or the cost of materials.

“There needs to be targeted efforts to restore trust and confidence,” she said.

She points to the success of the recovery effort in Joplin, Missouri, where a tornado ripped through town in May 2011, killing 161 and injuring more than 1,000 others. Total damage from the event: $2.8 billion.

Long said the community, including hundreds of volunteers, banded together to bring the city back. A Citizens Advisory Recovery Team formed to help guide the rebuilding effort. Structures in the city were built back to more rigorous building standards. And a few years after the disaster, many pointed to Joplin’s efforts as the way to come back from tragedy.

“If you take a look at a community like Joplin and look at satellite imagery and chart the progress, it’s like new growth after the winter,” Long said. “There’s every reason to be hopeful and confident in regions of Colorado that have been impacted like this.”

But it won’t come without bumps and challenges. In Lyons, friction developed between the town and its residents during the rebuilding effort. Residents of Superior and Louisville should expect things to get worse before they get better, Simonsen said.

“It will start happening around Valentine’s Day,” she said. “I think people are going to start getting very frustrated. Anger will start, then resentment will start to bubble. What happens is everyone wants to rebuild back now.”

Hubbard remembers the confrontations with federal and local officials as residents desperately tried to pull the proper permits to proceed with construction and restoration. She remembers meeting weekly with her neighbors and making sure they presented a united front before the town.

“We walked to town hall as a group — all 30 of us,” she said. “It was probably intimidating.”

But the recovery continued and the town is now stronger for it, with better-designed bridges spanning the St. Vrain and many houses in town now elevated on concrete pads. The town is readying construction of a new pedestrian bridge over the north fork of the river to replace the one demolished by the flood.

Peek, the CU professor, said neighborhoods torched by the Marshall fire may have a few cards in their pocket that other disaster areas didn’t have.

“The fact that schools weren’t destroyed, or as many businesses weren’t destroyed, more people might decide to stay,” she said.

And the work-from-home revolution brought about by the pandemic could allow displaced Marshall fire families to temporarily relocate to rental properties while their homes are rebuilt, making the transition from disaster easier than it might have been in the past, Peek said.

But Hubbard counsels patience to the thousands displaced by the Marshall fire.

“Be patient, because it isn’t going to happen overnight,” she said.

For her, she started out post-flood in three emergency shelters, then an assisted living facility in Boulder, then a rented home in Lyons and finally back to her property, where she camped in a 27-foot RV for the next 2 1/2 years watching her home go back up. Now she looks across her spacious living room to the picture window, outside of which the St. Vrain continues on its course.

“It’s still home,” Hubbard said.

The agency the way it underwrites flood risks across the country, with the changes taking effect on Oct. 1.

Existing customers with lower-valued homes have been paying too much for flood insurance, according to the agency’s , and those with higher-valued homes have paid too little.

Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Association, said the rate changes will balance out that disparity and also take into account increasing flood risks as climate change worsens and wildfires lead to more flooding.

The average customer currently buying flood insurance through the NFIP pays $958 a year, said Mark Friedlander, spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute in New York City. Those in Colorado deemed “low to moderate risk” generally pay under $500 a year.

New customers’ policies will begin under the new system, Friedlander said. But existing customers won’t see a change in their rates until after April 1, 2022, assuming they renew their insurance plans.

FEMA is by far the largest flood insurance provider in Colorado and across the country, Walker said. Friedlander estimated that of the about 21,000 Coloradans that buy flood insurance through FEMA:

• 43% will see a decrease in their premiums.
• 48% will see an increase up to $120 a year.
• 5% will see an increase up to $240 a year.
• 4% will see an increase greater than $240 a year.

Representatives for FEMA declined The Post����ap interview requests.

While private companies that offer flood insurance charge higher rates because they better assess that risk, Walker said, FEMA’s rates have been too low.

But also the flooding risk across Colorado is increasing, Walker added, pointing to the widespread 2013 floods as a pivot point in the state’s history. They killed 10 people, destroyed more than 1,800 homes and caused $4 billion in damage.

Foods inevitably follow in wildfires’ wake, and wildfires in Colorado are growing bigger and more frequent; the three largest in the state’s history happened in 2020.

Because the threat of floods increases due to burn scars left by wildfires, those areas are specifically included on the , according to Micki Trost, spokeswoman for Colorado’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

Colorado shattered its flash flood warning record by September 2021, with 282 warnings across the state compared to a 10-year average of about 100 warnings annually. The previous record, set in 2013, was 176 flash flood warnings.

FEMA uses flood threat maps like the state’s to assess flooding risk and set its insurance rates with its new system, Friedlander said.

“It����ap very tailored to your specific risk at your specific home,” he said.

The more people who buy flood insurance, the lower the rates are likely to go, Walker noted. If you don’t have flood insurance, you end up depending on emergency grants from FEMA — cash that can take years to come through if at all, she said.

Colorado watched as the state’s population exploded, marijuana became legal, a beloved sports icon died and gay marriage became the norm. The state grieved over mass shootings and celebrated a Super Bowl.

And on the eve of a new decade, we can only imagine what’s next.

With that in mind, here’s a look back at some of the decade’s biggest news stories, as selected by the editors of The Denver Post:

Explosive growth and development

Colorado added nearly 800,000 people to its population over the decade, pushing it from under 5 million to above 5.7 million. The bulk of that gain came from people relocating to the state, rather than births, which are decreasing. Most newcomers settled in metro Denver and in a narrow band of counties from Larimer and Weld to the north to El Paso and Elbert in the south.

The construction industry, devastated in the housing crash the previous decade, has struggled to keep pace, and median home prices in metro Denver have doubled, one of the biggest gains in the nation. As Denver-area homes became less affordable, buyers moved up and down Interstate 25, making Fort Collins and Colorado Springs some of the hottest housing markets in the country.

In Denver, developers snapped up land and scraped off old homes and buildings to make room for luxury apartment buildings and row homes. Many long-time residents of Denver’s older and poorer neighborhoods have been dislocated, contributing to concerns about gentrification that weighed heavily in the last city election.

— Aldo Svaldi

Aurora theater shooting

Colorado remembers their names: Jonathan Blunk, A.J. Boik, Jesse Childress, Gordon Cowden, Jessica Ghawi, John Thomas Larimer, Matt McQuinn, Micayla Medek, Veronica Moser-Sullivan, Alex Matthew Sullivan, Alex Teves and Rebecca Ann Wingo.

Those are the 12 people killed on July 20, 2012, when a gunman opened fire in a crowded movie theater during a midnight screening of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises.” Another 70 people were wounded in the killing spree that happened in a decade that witnessed some of the deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history.

A jury found the killer guilty of murder in 2015, but spared him from the death penalty.

The shooting would have significant political ramifications in Colorado. State lawmakers passed a ban on large-capacity ammunition magazines and approved mandatory background checks for private and online gun sales. Those laws continue to be controversial and challenged by gun rights groups. Tom Sullivan, the father of Alex Sullivan, who was killed inside the theater, was elected in 2018 to the Colorado House of Representatives.

— Noelle Phillips

Advancements in equality

Hours after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Utah’s ban on gay marriage in June 2014, Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of then-Colorado Attorney General John Suthers. Suthers failed to stop Hall, and pretty soon, Denver and Pueblo counties began issuing licenses to same-sex couples.

In July 2014, the Colorado Supreme Court ordered Boulder County to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. But by October of that year, the state high court legalized gay marriage across Colorado — and the U.S. Supreme Court followed suit in 2015.

Same-sex marriage became part of the normal fabric of the community. In 2018, Coloradans elected Jared Polis, the country’s first openly gay governor, and welcomed First Gentleman Marlon Reis into the governor’s mansion.

The fight over a balance between LGBTQ rights and religious freedoms dragged on. In 2012, Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips refused to bake a wedding cake for Charlie Craig and David Mullins. The couple sued, and the case eventually went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Phillips’ favor, saying the Colorado Civil Rights Commission failed to act as a neutral party in the dispute.

— Noelle Phillips

Marijuana legalization

Stoners everywhere celebrated in 2012 when Colorado voters blazed the trail for legal recreational marijuana. Colorado not only became the first state to legalize pot, but it became the only place in the world with such a liberal policy on pot sales.

Since Amendment 64 passed in 2012, Colorado businesses have sold more than $6 billion worth of weed and related products, and the state has collected more than $1 billion in tax revenue.

Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have followed Colorado’s lead.

Being a trailblazer, though, means being the first to encounter big questions: Just how much THC should be in one serving of an edible; how should pesticides be regulated; does legal weed mean a spike in traffic deaths; where can businesses deposit their money. Meanwhile, the federal government still says marijuana is illegal.

— Noelle Phillips

Transportation growing pains

With the addition of nearly 800,000 newcomers to the state, government planners had to figure out a way to keep them moving. Officials turned to rail, toll roads and more airport gates to alleviate congestion, and they found controversy at almost every turn.

An express toll lane on U.S. 36 opened in March 2016 between Denver and Boulder, and a toll lane is under construction on a heavily traveled stretch of Interstate 25 just south of Castle Rock known as The Gap.

Federal, state and local officials broke ground in January on a $1.2 billion, 10-mile Interstate 70 upgrade through Denver that will build new bridges, add lanes and adjust the interstate’s path by eliminating a two-mile viaduct between Colorado and Brighton boulevards. The project was opposed by residents in the Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods, who worried about pollution, noise and ultimately gentrification of their neighborhoods once the project is complete.

Denver International Airport announced two projects: It will add 39 gates at a cost of $1.5 billion and it will expand its terminal in a project that will exceed $650 million. The terminal project has overrun its projected cost amid a fight with the original lead contractor, a lengthy delay and the selection of a new company to lead the construction.

Finally, RTD expanded its train lines, opening the University of Colorado A-Line’s 23-mile route in April 2016 that connects downtown Denver to DIA. The G-Line was overdue when it finally started running in April between Denver, Adams County, Arvada and Wheat Ridge. The starts were less than perfect, with construction overruns, problems with gate crossings and delays that frustrated travelers.

— Noelle Phillips

Oil and gas regulation

While Colorado’s economy chugged along, the oil and gas industry remained a critical, albeit controversial, piece of the pie. Whether it was an up-and-down oil market, fracking in neighborhoods or defining the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission’s mission, the industry dominated business news.

By the end of the decade, natural resources and mining represented $13.1 billion of the state’s gross domestic product and made up 1% of the state’s jobs. In the past decade, crude oil production topped $10 billion at its peak in 2017, up from $2.3 billion in 2010. Natural gas production ended the decade just below $5 billion, down from almost $7 billion in 2010, according to the 2020 Colorado Business Economic Outlook produced by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business.

But Coloradans grappled with the health, environmental and public safety impacts of natural gas extraction and drilling.

Earlier this year, Colorado officials announced their intention to toughen oversight after a scientific study found operations could expose people to unhealthy levels of benzene and other chemicals. In 2017, a fatal home explosion in Firestone killed two people and injured another because gas was seeping through a cut-off underground pipeline into the house. That incident forced an audit of�� A found that at least 51 oil and gas workers were killed on the job between 2003 and 2014, amid lax industry oversight.

— Noelle Phillips

Women in sports

From Olympic podiums in Canada, Brazil and Russia to the wrestling mats at Denver’s Pepsi Center, Colorado’s female athletes pushed the boundaries of excellence.

The world watched Vail’s Lindsey Vonn became one of Alpine skiing’s all-time greats, while fellow skier Mikaela Shiffrin became the youngest slalom champion in the sport����ap history.

Domination didn’t end on the slopes. Centennial’s Missy Franklin set world records in the pool, Golden’s Lindsey Horan took home the National Women’s Soccer League MVP trophy, and she and Littleton’s Mallory Pugh helped the U.S. women’s national soccer team win the 2019 FIFA World Cup. Boulder middle-distance runners Jenny Simpson and Emma Coburn pushed the U.S. women’s track and field team to new heights in the Olympic games.

As veterans like Vonn retire, the next generation of Colorado stars are ready to shine. Regis Jesuit����ap Fran Belibi dazzled the nation with one-handed power dunks on the basketball court while Valley High School’s Angel Rios and Skyview High School’s Jasslyn Gallegos shattered wrestling’s glass ceiling.

— Sam Tabachnik

Devastating wildfires

Colorado’s renowned forests are a statewide treasure that can all too quickly turn to kindling. And as the state’s climate shifts toward greater aridity, the decade has seen some of Colorado’s most devastating fires, which consumed lives, homes and natural habitats.��

In June 2013, the Black Forest wildfire in Colorado Springs became the most destructive fire in Colorado history, scorching 14,280 acres, burning 489 homes and killing two people. The blaze caused an estimated $420.5 million in property destruction.��

The state’s second-most destructive fire, the Waldo Canyon fire, came a year earlier, killing two people and wiping out 347 Colorado Springs homes. And the decade opened with the Fourmile Canyon fire in Boulder County, which destroyed 169 homes in 2010 — and that, too, was the state’s most destructive fire at the time.

Then in the summer of 2018, the Spring Creek Fire��ravaged more than 108,000 acres of Costilla and Huerfano counties, and a��coal-fired train operated by a historical railroad started the 416 wildfire that burned more than 50,000 acres north of Durango.

Experts blamed extreme drought conditions for making 2018 one of the most destructive fire seasons in the state’s history, but 2019 was much milder thanks to large amounts of snow in the mountains.

— Elizabeth Hernandez

The Broncos and the Bowlens

On Feb. 7, 2016, minutes after the Denver Broncos defeated the Carolina Panthers to win the team’s third Super Bowl, president and general manager John Elway grabbed the Lombardi trophy and declared, “This one’s for Pat.”

The touching tribute was an ode to owner Pat Bowlen, who in 2014 gave up day-to-day control of the team because of his Alzheimer’s disease. Although he wasn’t able to be in the stands to see his team win Super Bowl 50, “Mr. B” was omnipresent, the guiding presence for four decades of team success.

But as Bowlen disappeared from public eye, the team struggled to regain its championship glory. Since Peyton Manning’s retirement, the Broncos have missed the playoffs four consecutive years and finished the last three season with losing records.

On June 13, Bowlen died at the age of 75. Team ownership remains a question as the Bowlen family engages in a bitter, public battle for control. A three-person board of trustees oversees the team, and will pick Bowlen’s successor. And as the decade comes to a close, there is no sign that any of Bowlen’s children has a clear path to succeed their father.

— Sam Tabachnik

Changing telecom industry

An iconic Colorado phone company evaporated in 2011 when CenturyLink acquired Qwest in a $24 billion deal. The merger created the country’s third-largest landline phone company that employed 47,500 people and served 15 million phone and 5 million broadband customers in 37 states.

Qwest was founded by Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz and invested heavily in building fiber-optic internet infrastructure. Its growth was fueled by a mega-merger of its own in 2000 when it absorbed US West, the Denver-based progeny of the antitrust breakup of AT&T, in a $45 billion deal.

After the CenturyLink deal, Qwest����ap bright blue sign was removed from its 52-story downtown skyscraper, and in 2011 the building at 1801 California St. was sold for $215 million.

The merger was part of shifting communications landscape as more people dropped landlines in favor of mobile phones and companies gobbled up each other to expand their networks across the country.

As a new decade dawns, Douglas County-based Dish Network is poised to reestablish the Front Range as a telecom hub. If a T-Mobile-Sprint merger is finalized, Dish (and its stockpile of wireless spectrum) has been approved to become the country’s fourth major mobile phone service provider.

— Noelle Phillips and Joe Rubino

Flood of 2013

The clouds swelled in September 2013, dropping a five-day deluge of rain across two dozen counties along Colorado’s Front Range. Rivers overflowed. Homes flooded. Roadways crumbled.

Nearly a year’s worth of precipitation pounded the state in less than a week, causing a that was deemed Colorado’s costliest natural disaster with damage reaching $4 billion.

Nine people died, more than 1,800 homes were lost, almost 500 miles of roads were shut down and more than 1,000 people had to be rescued and evacuated by helicopter.��More than 17 inches of rainfall cut access to entire communities including Jamestown, Lyons and Estes Park.

The flood re-shaped entire towns and neighborhoods, displacing thousands of Coloradans and prompting upward of $2 billion in federal, state and local money allocated toward recovery efforts.

— Elizabeth Hernandez

The beer industry

Changes brewed in the Colorado beer industry over the last decade — and, in particular, this past year.

Coors, a 147-year-old company, made Chicago its new headquarters, leaving its Golden brewery as its major presence back home. New Belgium Brewing, the largest craft brewer in the state and the third-largest in the country, sold to an international conglomerate. And Colorado’s oldest craft brewery, Boulder Beer, planned to shrink from distribution across 34 states to solely selling pints out of a local brewpub — until Denver-based contract brewer Sleeping Giant swooped in, keeping Boulder Beer on shelves.��

And longtime Colorado residents now only have fond memories of beer with 3.2% alcohol by volume��after Jan. 1, when 1,600 grocery and convenience stores across Colorado were allowed to sell full-strength beer for the first time since Prohibition.��

Looking back on the 2010s, sales to private equity or big beer, growth in specialty brewpubs and second taprooms were other common themes. Starting in 2015, Fireman Capital invested an undisclosed amount in Longmont-based Oskar Blues, and Anheuser-Busch InBev bought out Breckenridge Brewing. Then Denver’s founding Wynkoop Brewing in 2016 stopped all of its retail sales. By 2017, Boulder’s Avery Brewing had sold a 30% stake to Spain’s Mahou San Miguel (). Meanwhile, cash infusions and competition led to Colorado breweries opening taprooms as far afield as North Carolina or closer to home in Denver, as was the case for Oskar Blues, New Belgium, Odell and now Ska Brewing.

For all the upheaval, Colorado still ranks second-highest in the U.S. with 396 active craft breweries, based on the . We also rank first for craft beer’s economic impact. ��

— Josie Sexton

Updated Dec. 31, 2019, at 3:47 p.m. Because of an error by a reporter, the original version of this story misidentified one of the two major wireless carriers that are looking to merge. T-Mobile is the company seeking to acquire Sprint. Also, in the section about the Aurora theater shooting, John Thomas Larimer’s last name was left out.

The home of Jyoti Sharp, at 175 Main St., was sawed in half by the raging floodwaters that roared down from the hills and the James Creek drainage the second week of September 2013, forever altering the course of James Creek, leaving it as pretty much a coin toss whether the house could even be salvaged.

And due to a series of unexpected hurdles she had to get over to repair it, its wreckage sat for five years square in the center of this close-knit community of some 250 people, a brutal reminder of the traumatic events nearly six years ago that included .

But fresh Tyvek now wraps the walls of the rebuilt home, a spacious south-facing deck now overlooks the pools and riffles of the re-engineered and restored James Creek, and the general contractor expects that Sharp, who bought a second home just west of town in the wake of the flood, can reclaim occupancy this fall.

“Everyone I meet in town is just so happy, not just for me, I think, but also for the town, because it����ap been, like you said, such a reminder of the floods that happened almost six years ago,” Sharp said, seated in the living room of her newer home on Overland Road.

Boulder resident Randy Zahn is the supervisor on the rebuilding job for general contractor Gavin Bell. He was on the job site Thursday and gave a visitor a walking tour of the ongoing project.

“People walk by here, and they thank me for building it. They are happy. They are excited,” Zahn said. “The community is behind it. They’re glad to see it moving so fast.”

It may be doing so now, but it was a long haul just to get to the starting line.

Sharp joked that when she told a friend the home’s progress might be reported in the news, her friend said, “I can see the headlines now. ‘Last home in Boulder County to be rebuilt.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, how do you spell procrastination?’”

To another friend, she had said, “I hope people aren’t upset that it took so long. And he laughed and said, ‘Oh Jyoti, people can’t stay angry that long.’”

Delays, setbacks

One obstacle she faced is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency made her a buyout offer, which she considered. Had she accepted, no one would have been permitted to rebuild there.

“But then, their offer was so low. It was ridiculously low,” Sharp said. “But a lot of my neighbors took that option.”

Additionally, Sharp said, “Habitat for Humanity was going to help me rebuild and provide a loan for the difference in what I got from insurance. And then they backed out very unexpectedly. So that was a setback.”

Flatirons Habitat For Humanity Executive Director Susan Lythgoe said it was true that the organization looked at options for assisting on Sharp’s property with Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Relief with funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — as it did for several other homes in Jamestown — but that it was not true Habitat backed out “unexpectedly.”

Rather, Lythgoe said, it was a matter of there not being a place to locate a septic system that would not be in the floodway.

Another delay concerned Boulder County’s redrawing of the floodplain mapping for her area. Initially, it appeared her home would be within the 100-year floodplain, in which case its ground floor would have been uninhabitable, she said. Then-Jamestown mayor Tara Schoedinger advised her to wait on completion of the floodplain remapping — and when that was finished, thanks in part to extensive flood mitigation engineering out the back door on James Creek, she was now out of the 100-year floodplain.

Like everyone who suffered through the 2013 flood, Sharp’s memories of its destruction are vivid. She had sunk about $100,000 into the residence just a few months before the flood, in order to create living space for herself on the ground floor, with the second floor outfitted to accommodate short-term renters. The night that it was cleanly cleaved by the floodwaters, Sept. 12, she had already been evacuated up the hill to the nearby Jamestown Elementary School.

“When I woke up the next morning after a fitful night����ap sleep — I think all of us had a fitful night����ap sleep, because the school was starting to flood, too, and we were all sleeping on mats, trying to stay out of the water — when I woke up the next morning my neighbors greeted me with hugs and condolences. Because they had already seen that my house had gone down, overnight.”

Friends walked her out to a bluff overlooking the heart of town, and she could see that, like many, her life been turned upside down by forces beyond anyone’s control.

Gratitude

Construction supervisor Zahn said he has seen, just in the few months he has been working there, that even in a routine heavy rain, “The water that comes down off that road (Main Street) is phenomenal.”

Zahn said that he and Bell, the general contractor, met in Jamestown back in the 1970s, and share many good memories of those days. His own longtime familiarity with the town adds to his sensitivity about the project����ap importance not just to Sharp, but to all her neighbors.

“We’re making (design) decisions not based on what Jyoti needs now, but what the community might need,” Zahn said. As he stood outside the home’s east side, facing toward the popular nearby Jamestown Mercantile, he said the builders are considering factors such as “how she relates to the community, on this side. That����ap now one of our concerns — and how the property transitions to grade.”

When the project is complete, it will feature a master bedroom, kitchen and living room with propane fireplace on the ground floor where Sharp will reside, plus three bedrooms, an office and kitchen upstairs, which will be available for short- and longer-term rentals.

Sharp has been living during her forced exile in her beautiful second home, with breathtaking views of the high country landscape, which she bought nearby on much higher ground outside town after the flood. That����ap the same home that promptly suffered $40,000 in damage when it was rented for the weekend to six people, who threw a memorable weekend high school rager there for 250 of their closest friends, charging $15 admission, and eventually earning two Fairview High students — the bacchanal’s organizers — convictions for felony trespassing.

But that is perhaps a story for another day. Sharp — whose first name is her “spirit name,” she said, derived from jyotis, the Sanskrit word for “light of the sun” — said she is filled, nearly six years after the disaster that ravaged her home, her town, and much of the northern Front Range, with gratitude.

“Wouldn’t have come this far without so many incredible people and acts of kindness along the way… the volunteers who came from every direction, the grit of neighbors who lived through their own losses and kept persevering, the love and care of my family & friends, but most of all Mayor Tara,” she wrote in an email. “She’s the one who got all of us through to the other side.”

And now, she is looking forward to moving back down to her primary residence in town when its rebirth is completed this fall.

“I’ve lived up here five years now. It����ap beautiful up here,” she said of her home on Overland Road. “But the quiet and the solitude has an edge to it, especially in the winter. It����ap too isolated.

“So, I want to be among my people again. My community.”

The U.S. Department of Transportation, as part of its latest��$705 million Emergency Relief fund, will release the money to Colorado to be used on 2013 flood repairs and��U.S. 550 rockfall damage, according to a CDOT news release.

“Since the 2013 floods, and after last year’s U.S. 550 rock slide, we have worked persistently to ensure our state has the resources it needs to fully recover, but there is more work to do,” Sen. Michael Bennet said in the release. “This funding will make it possible to complete final repair projects — rebuilding our infrastructure and making our communities more resilient to future disasters.”

The bulk of the Colorado money — $21.5 million — will be used to complete the final permanent repair projects from the 2013 floods, the release said.��An additional $1.25 million will be used for the Red Mountain Pass project in southwest Colorado to repair damage from a 2018 rock slide.

“The disastrous floods in 2013 and rockslide on US 550 last summer both caused significant damage to our infrastructure,”��Sen. Cory Gardner said in an email. “I’ve consistently advocated for and delivered funding to Colorado to help deal with the aftermath of natural disasters, and I’m pleased this��much-needed��funding has been made available to help��our��communities recover.”

Twenty-seven days into a partial government shutdown, business in Estes Park, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, was “slower than slow,” a longtime store owner said Thursday.

“Since the middle of last week, things have dropped off dramatically. The town’s fairly deserted,” said Charley Dickey, who owns a gift and home-decor store in Estes Park.

Business typically drops off in town as fall turns to winter. But the lack of services in the national park and the decision to shut the entrances when the roads became snowy and icy seem to be discouraging visitors.

The park is using��Federal Land and Recreation Enhancement funds to bring back a limited number of employees to do limited maintenance, including plowing roads, so people can at least drive into the park now. Still, Dickey fears that people are just deciding not to make the trip.

“We will go for hours and there will be nobody in our store. We usually see a reasonable amount of traffic, even this time of year,” Dickey said.

On an email survey by Dickey,��president of the Estes Valley Partners for Commerce board, about 100 business owners said they have experienced losses because of the shutdown.��He plans to share the results with town officials next week.

The partial shutdown kicked in when funding lapsed for about a quarter of the federal government, including the Interior Department, which includes the National Park Service.

A standoff between President Donald Trump and Congress over $5.7 billion in funding for a wall on the U.S. southern border has blocked approval of the money needed to reopen the agencies. More than 800,000 federal employees are furloughed or working without pay.

“In the old days, people would look for common ground and have discussions,” said Dickey. “That doesn’t��seem to be the way of the world any more. Sad.”

And while federal workers are expected to receive back pay when the shutdown ends, Dickey said affected business people won’t. They’ll have to try to make it up down the road, he added.

Kent Mountain Adventure Center in Estes Park has been expanding its guided winter activities, from backcountry skiing to snowshoeing, and working toward being a year-round employer. Co-owner Dustin Dyer said Friday the winter business has steadily grown the past five years, so he thought this would be the break-through year.

Then came the partial government shutdown Dec. 22. Dyer said about 60 percent of his customers have canceled as a result.

“The peak season for winter is right around Christmas and New Year,” Dyer said. “We just lost that whole peak season.”

Down the road from Estes Park, it’s the status of federal grants for disaster relief rather than tourism that has people��nervous. The town of Lyons, devastated by the 2013 flood that hit about two dozen Colorado counties, is supposed to be in its final year of funding for restoration projects that include replacing a bridge that provides access to numerous homes and two schools and relocating a water line.

“We have five major projects that are currently being held up at the federal level because of lack of staff to review and approve them,” said Victoria Simonsen, Lyons town administrator.

Simonsen is concerned about losing some of the $15 million in funding lined up for the projects if the town misses deadlines because there’s no one at the federal level to do the work.

The federal agencies the town is working with — the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Commerce Department — are among those shuttered.

The state is the recipient of the federal grants and the town is the sub-recipient. Staffers at two of the agencies handling the grants said the funding has been approved and the shutdown, while creating delays, won’t affect the projects.

“The funding for all those programs have already been allocated. No disaster funding is impacted by the shutdown,” said Micki Trost, spokeswoman for the��Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

If necessary, the state and town can apply for extensions, said Natriece Bryant,��chief administrative officer for the Colorado Department of Local Affairs.

What worries Simonsen is not knowing whether the extensions will be granted. She said she was taken aback when the president talked about using disaster funds to pay for the border wall if he can’t get congressional approval.

Furloughed federal workers in Colorado, who aren’t being paid, are applying for unemployment benefits to get by. As of Friday, the number of claims related to the shutdown totaled 2,416, the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment said in a release. That’s out of 13,072 claims submitted since Dec 22.

Interior Department employees have filed 39 percent of the claims. Others are Agriculture Department, 23 percent; federal contractors, 13 percent; Treasury Department, 10 percent; and Justice Department 5 percent.

The Bureau of Land Management, an Interior Department agency that oversees tens of millions of acres of public land in Colorado and across the West, is operating with a bare-bones crew. The problem, said Nada Culver of The Wilderness Society, is that it’s hard to figure out which BLM activities are ongoing and which aren’t.

The oil and gas leases sold by the Colorado BLM in December are being issued but no information has been posted on lease sales scheduled for March and June, said Culver, The Wilderness Society’s senior counsel and��director of the group’s Denver-based Bureau of Land Management Action Center.��The lack of information matters because there are specific deadlines and limited time periods for public comments, she added.

The BLM is charged with being stewards of the land, protecting the natural resources and the multiple uses of the land, not just processing oil and gas leases and permits, Culver said.

“That’s the law, that’s not just my opinion as someone with The Wilderness Society,” Culver said. “You can’t ignore the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Historic Preservation Act. Our concern is that’s just what they’re doing right now.”

She noted the deadline for public comments on the Interior Department’s proposal to limit requests for public records under the Freedom of Information Act��is Jan. 28.

No one answered calls Friday at the Colorado BLM, including in the communications and director’s offices. A recording said agency funding had lapsed and the staff isn’t authorized to work during the shutdown.

Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, a trade association, said BLM employees processing oil and gas drilling permits on public lands are being paid by revenue from permit fees.

“BLM is maintaining a skeletal staff, in general,” Sgamma. “But there are things happening out in the field, and for safety considerations that is one of those essential functions that it does need to maintain.”

However, if the shutdown drags on, Sgamma said the upcoming lease sales might not happen. And although companies typically apply for drilling permits several months in advance, Sgamma said they might have to wait longer than usual if the bulk of the BLM staff doesn’t go back to work for a while.

“You’re going to see rigs having to be laid down because the permits just aren’t there,” Sgamma said.

The shutdown’s effects on business aren’t relegated to those dependent on tourism near national parks or drilling on public lands. Businesses that import their goods or need approval for products, like brewers and winemakers,��are running into problems as well.

Craig Lewis, the owner of a Boulder-based wine distributor Stelvio Selections, never thought the shutdown would impact his livelihood.

“Honestly, two weeks ago I didn’t see any reason to be worried about it,” Lewis told the Boulder Daily Camera.

But with the shutdown in its fourth week, Lewis and others in the alcohol industry are feeling the impact.

“It’s a trickle-down effect,” Lewis said. “And the longer it goes on, the more people it’s going to reach.”

The problems stem from the closure of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the federal agency that handles applications for new alcohol businesses and approves labels for new products.

And so Lewis this week found himself in France, trying to deal with a backlog because he can’t get the paperwork to import wines into the country.

“We’re having a lot of delays at the ports, delays registering your brands, we can’t get rosé samples sent in,” Lewis said.

Lewis said the effect the shutdown will have on his business will be a long-lasting one.

“It’s something where maybe I won’t realize the full effect of it until summer,” he said. “We’re just pushing everything back further and further.”

Mitchell Byars of the Boulder Daily Camera contributed to this report.

But the reason FEMA rejected the funding set off alarms in county offices.

FEMA, the agency that assists with disaster-recovery funding across the country, told Boulder County officials that a rebuilt portion of Geer Canyon Road damaged in the 2013 flood wouldn’t be funded because the county didn’t uniformly apply local construction codes and standards to the project.

Larimer County this spring also discovered FEMA had the same issue with its flood recovery work on County Road 44H, also known as Buckhorn Road.

If applied to 14 pending reimbursement applications, some of which entail multiple construction projects, the reasoning behind FEMA’s initial decisions could put Boulder County on the hook for $37 million it thought would come from the feds, according to Boulder County Commissioners’ Deputy Michelle Krezek.

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But that routine changed when the Drake Post Office was closed last spring, and Huffman and other area residents were informed they would instead need to pick up their mail at the Post Office in Glen Haven, seven miles northwest of Drake. The Postal Service does not deliver to residential addresses in the area.

The closure is the second related to the 2013 flood after officials discovered rotting in the flooring that they said makes the building unsafe — a closure that Huffman said has added at least 30 minutes to his pickup time and has caused him frustration over the lack of information shared.

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