Friday 5 pm
It occurs to me that these stage and flow forecasts are displaying a baseline recession curve. That means they show what would happen without any more rain.
This is what happened with the Dolores River and Mancos River when I woke up cranky and got in trouble (again) this morning. If you missed it, we went two days with CBRFC (NOAA’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center) forecasting no problems with the Dolores River, while the experts (local residents) emailed me with their concerns. I woke up at 3 am this morning, and their forecast peak was over action stage.
Dolores locals (many whitewater rafters who understand all of this better than I) tell me they are concerned that, at a certain level, the river will take back its historic floodplain. It’s called channel avulsion. Water doesn’t like to be engineered; eventually, water wins.
In the railroad days of the late 1800s and early 1900s, they literally moved the Dolores River to protect the tracks and support a new town layout.
Then early October 1911, a massive Eastern Pacific Hurricane recurved and turned a firehose over what is now our forecast area (sound familiar?). The Dolores River re-occupied (for a while) its former home.
This was the same storm that flooded Durango in 1911, and Pagosa, and everywhere in our forecast area. The Animas blew right through Durango with 25,000 cfs, washing out the bridges at 15th Street—including the Denver & Rio Grande railroad bridge right where the train used to cross —even after they desperately parked coal railcars on it to try to weigh it down (geniuses)…
Sorry, huge rabbit hole.
Whatever I do, I am not going to talk about the Post Halloween Storm. Yes, Moms and Dads, I looked at the Demons away schedule.