Now, There's Nothing There

In a cabin somewhere down below, he had spent his honeymoon. Now he could not find the cabin--or much of anything else. Gazing through the window of a helicopter, Colorado's Governor Richard Lamm, 41, stared in silence at the apocalyptic scene along the banks of the Big Thompson River--splayed bridges, kindling from hundreds of vanished homes, hulks of cars turned upside down like giant beetles. "We found a hotel ledger this morning that showed 23 paying guests," he said finally to TIME Correspondent David De Voss. "But we can't find the people. The river has reclaimed the canyon from all its intruders."

The devastation was so complete that even after a week of rescue work, nobody knew for sure how much damage had been caused when a torrential downpour sent a flash flood raging down the canyon, 40 miles north of Denver. The disaster struck on the centennial of Colorado's entry into the U.S., and it was certainly the most stunning in the state's history. Some communities virtually disappeared, and the loss was estimated at $50 million.

Some bodies were easy to find: they dangled grotesquely from trees, protruded from shoals, or were wedged into crevices high up on the canyon wall. But the waters had hidden corpses everywhere. Others were found in corn-and hayfields near Loveland, eight miles beyond the canyon's mouth. One body was carried 25 miles to Greeley. At week's end the death total was nearing 100. But, incredibly, more than 800 people were still missing six days after the flood--the most graphic illustration of the power of the water that had cascaded down from the mountains.

Cooling Vapor. The Big Thompson River canyon had long been a very special place for Colorado residents and tourists alike. Situated on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, the canyon starts at about 7,500 ft. In a stretch of 25 miles, moving eastward from the Continental Divide, it descends some 2,000 ft. The walls of the canyon tower over what used to be a pleasant trout stream sparkling in the depths below. The canyon was not unspoiled, but neither was it ruined by money: the big, Aspen-style condominiums had been kept away, and most of the 1,400 dwellings along the river were rustic cabins whose owners often were retirees.

The idea that a flood--a real flood --could hit the Big Thompson seemed preposterous. The area averaged only 14 in. of rain a year, and the river was only about 18 in. deep. When storm clouds began building up in the late afternoon of July 31, no one was very worried. Such clouds are normally dispersed by strong 30-to-40-m.p.h. winds blowing easterly across the Rockies. But this time, a nearly stagnant cold front lay over the peaks. As the dark clouds rose over a cul-de-sac at Estes Park, far up in the canyon, they collided with the mass of cold air. The cooling vapor began to condense into drops. At 6 p.m. it began to rain on the high eastern slopes of the Continental Divide. Nobody could have predicted that in the next six nightmarish hours, 14 in. would fall--as much as in a normal year.

At 7:35 p.m. the National Weather Service in Denver warned of severe thunderstorms and noted the possibility of flooding. Shortly thereafter, County Sheriff Bob Watson began to worry about the campers and residents in the Big Thompson canyon. At about 8:30 p.m. two of his deputies and two state patrolmen started trying to persuade people to move out. Most of them stayed put, pointing out that it was not even raining where they were. "We had trouble convincing them that the river was even coming up," says Watson. "They'd want to know if it was coming up to here," (he touched his thigh) "or to here" (he touched his waist).

At 8:45 p.m., in the midst of the Olympics, Helen Hill's television set suddenly went dark. She walked out of her house, which is 300 ft. from the river. Everything looked all right, she recalls, "but the wind told me what was coming."

As a wall of water hurtled down the canyon, a wailing and moaning wind preceded it along the Big Thompson. When the water began to rise, Helen Hill, who is in her mid-fifties, scrambled to a perch five limbs up on a ponderosa pine and later that night watched the flood in a series of flickering still lifes illuminated by lightning. "I saw poor Mrs. Greeley--84, she is--go down the river. And I could hear the cabins around us go. They sounded like the lid of a wooden apple box being pried off."

Hissing Gas. By 9 p.m. the police officers who were spreading the alarm were running into trouble themselves. The rising waters apparently caught the car driven by Sergeant W. Hugh Purdy, 53, a state patrolman, and swept it away. As far as can be determined, he was the first to die in the flood.

As the river surged over its banks, Andy and Barbara Anderson abandoned their home two minutes before a wave of debris deposited six feet of silt in their living room. With their two daughters, they just managed to drive to high ground. The night passed slowly. The smell was overwhelming: a mixture of sewage, diesel fuel and the gas from propane tanks. The escaping gas sounded like a banshee's wail as it hissed through broken connections. The onrushing waters roared like an avalanche.

"I'll never forget the screams of people frantically waving flashlights as they passed by," says Barbara Anderson. Cars floated past like funeral barks, their headlights still ablaze, before they were smashed or submerged. Trailers were swept along with people trapped inside. The Andersons could hear the screams until they were muffled by the sounds of the mobile homes breaking up.

When dazed survivors climbed down from trees or ledges on Sunday morning, they found a new canyon; at 30 separate places the Big Thompson had jumped its banks to change course. Hydrologists were equally stunned by the sheer force the flood had generated. Once in 100 years, they had figured, the Big Thompson might be hit by a flood sending 19,000 cu. ft. of water a second through a section called The Narrows at a depth of 12 ft. But the storm that destroyed a vacationland sent 40,000 cu. ft. per sec. through the gap at an incredible depth of 30 ft.--some 320,000 gal. per sec. In the hamlet of Glen Haven, 80% of the buildings were seriously damaged or destroyed. Most of Drake's 200 residents are still missing, and the village remains cut off. From Drake east to the mouth of the canyon, nearly everything has disappeared.

All Gone. As the rescue work went on, searchers began using German shepherds and bloodhounds to find bodies. Many of the dead were buffeted so hard against rocks and the walls of the canyon that they were stripped of their clothes. Some of the corpses were dismembered, most were bloated and unrecognizable. To make identifications, five dentists and eight FBI fingerprint specialists were called in.

At Loveland High School, which was converted into a rescue center. Andy Anderson thought back over his experience. "You know," he said, "just Saturday morning I was saying to a neighbor how lucky we were to be living in the middle of what God created. Then all of a sudden it's all gone. I'll never forget seeing all those families killed, and that takes a lot of beauty out of the place. I don't want to go back to Iowa. But there's no way to sit here and enjoy the view because there's nothing there."

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