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Five years ago, the 2013 floods swept through Colorado

One man who works for a flood warning system on the Front Range reflects on the flood, and some of the changes since.

KUSA — The catastrophic flooding in September 2013 killed several people, left thousands without homes and cost billions of dollars in cleanup efforts.

Kevin Stewart remembers watching the waters rise. He's the manager of Flood Warning Services for the Urban Drainage and Flood Control District.

“I don’t think anybody in the area has ever seen anything quite of this magnitude, in terms of total volume of rain,” Stewart said. “Total amount of inches of rain, 15-20 inches of rain, we don’t talk about that in Colorado.”

Stewart’s team ensures 40 different local governments in seven metro Denver counties know what to expect when a storm hits.

Since 2013, communities have rebuilt roads, bridges and homes. Flood mitigation is ongoing across the state. Stewart’s team made changes, too.

“On the warning end, we streamlined communications a bit more,” he explained, saying one change was just simplifying the language.

“We worked closely with the 911 [communication] centers on the kind of information they were getting, how they perceived it.”

He said the flood district has also simplified data and made it easier for citizens to access it. For example, people can follow a Twitter account that posts notifications when heavy rain is falling in certain parts of the metro area.

“When those alerts go out, we know at a minimum we have street flooding problems, at a minimum. Worst case, we have a major flood.” Stewart said.

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