In a photo taken Sept. 13, 2013, residents of Eastwood Mobile Home Park in Evans salvage some items from their flooded home. Volunteers are compiling an oral history of the historic flood based on interviews with victims and those who came to their aid.
In a photo taken Sept. 13, 2013, residents of Eastwood Mobile Home Park in Evans salvage some items from their flooded home. Volunteers are compiling an oral history of the historic flood based on interviews with victims and those who came to their aid.Associated Press file photo

“What may seem to be current events now may become history,” said Susan Becker, program manager for the project. “Oral history recordings are a way to create a primary source for history.”

Volunteer interviewers with the Boulder Library’s Maria Rogers Oral History Project have been interviewing 40 to 80 Boulder County residents a year to gather their experiences. Early subjects were homesteaders who arrived in Boulder by covered wagon and who worked the mines and farms that drove the region’s economy.

Becker said the flood project seeks to take a very broad view of the flood and collect interviews from people who were evacuated, who experienced damage to their homes and who worked as first responders, but also from people who repaired roads and open space trails and worked to assess the success and failure of flood mitigation efforts.

Interviewers hope to complete most interviews by the one-year anniversary of the flood.

“When you interview people soon after, you get a kind of detail that might be lost if you talk to people later, and if you talk to people a little further down the road, you get perspective that you don’t get closer to the events,” Becker said. “We want to get both.”

The mid-September floods killed nine people and damaged or destroyed nearly 2,000 homes, mostly in four counties, including Boulder County. Larimer, Logan and Weld counties were also hit hard.

Boulder County said in October about 500 homes were destroyed or significantly damaged, and several major roads were washed out. Between 1,000 and 2,000 homes had nonstructural damage, and those figures were still being tallied. Boulder city officials said the floods caused an estimated $40 million in damage, mostly to open space land, roads and bridges. Figures for other hard-hit communities in the county, including Lyons, were not available.

Oral historians increasingly have sought to document current events, Becker said. The most prominent efforts in the last decade involved recording accounts of survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina, Becker said.

Project participants want to talk to utility workers, meteorologists, homeowners and renters, residents of mobile home parks, farmers, university administrators, and students and to rescuers.

Becker said anyone who is interested in telling their flood story can contact the library.