More rain means more possible hillslides this week
With more rain expected through much of this week, the pressure is on city workers to maintain their flood prevention measures.
That means that homeowners on the west side of Colorado Springs continue to play the waiting game.
In 1983, the British pop group The Eurythmics sang “Here Comes the Rain Again”. It’s an appropriate description of our weather these days.
“Lately it’s been terrific rain,” said Jeff Kaminski, a Rockrimmon resident.
The 1980s is also when the Kaminskis came to the Rockrimmon neighborhood on the northwest side of Colorado Springs.
“(We) built this house in ’88,” said Kaminski.
Now the Kaminskis are seeing something they’ve never seen before – a hillside across from them tumbling into the valley below them.
“We sat here and I was actually counting to 10 and before I could get to 10 I’d see another piece of the hill go away,” said Kaminski.
The trail that runs through the valley is closed, part of it taken out by the rushing waters of Rockrimmon Creek.
Kaminski said, “it’s just not safe back there now.”
The city’s solution is to keep the creeks clean using retention ponds.
After the Waldo Canyon fire in 2012, the city built a lot of retention ponds to keep northwestern Colorado Springs from flooding.
But with all of the rain that we’ve seen recently, these ponds have filled up very quickly.
The city is hitting high priority areas Monday.
“We’re focusing on the most important areas, which is the Autism Center,” said Tim Mitros with the city’s engineering department.
But with the continuous rainfall, the city can’t keep up. It takes about a week just to clean out the small ponds.
And the need for the ponds will not be going away any time soon.
“We expect for the next 10 years, we’re still going to have a lot of sediment coming down,” said Mitros.
So for now, people on the west side will continue to watch carefully whenever it rains.
Mitros says that crews are focusing on the entire city to inspect the creeks and to keep them from clogging up.
He estimates that it will take a month of dry weather to get to all of the retention ponds.
