DRAKE — Sallie Overs’ voice rises with emotion when she talks about the night her father’s house washed away.
Yes, she’s grieving the loss of his home of 30 years, all his possessions, the ashes of her late mother.
But mostly, she’s angry.
“I was immediately mad the day of the flood,” the Niwot resident said recently, six months after the raging Big Thompson River wiped away Frank Miller’s home near Drake, leaving no trace.
“The whole flood day was just ridiculous for myself and my father. He wasn’t notified of the dam being opened during the flood. He wasn’t evacuated,” she said.
“I was furious. I tried numerous times that day to get hold of the Larimer sheriff to tell them ‘Don’t open the gates.’ It’s like throwing gasoline on a fire,” Overs said.
“As you can see, I’m still distraught. This has just been awful,” she said.
Overs is one of three people who have filed tort claims against the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, operators of Olympus Dam at Lake Estes.
The claimants say the bureau’s actions during the record-setting rainfall of Sept. 12 and 13 exacerbated the flooding in the Big Thompson Canyon and that the government should reimburse them for their losses.
The federal government doesn’t agree.
All three claims have been denied, according to Kara Lamb, the Loveland-based spokeswoman for the Bureau of Reclamation.
“We’re really sympathetic to the community at large and all the people who suffered such horrible losses during the flood,” Lamb said.
But Lake Estes and Olympus Dam never were meant for flood control, she said — the dam isn’t designed for it, and the bureau isn’t authorized to use it that way.
The dam, completed in 1949 as part of the Colorado-Big Thompson water-diversion project, is designed to hold water that is piped over from the headwaters of the Colorado River on the west side of the Continental Divide.
“On any given day of an average year, roughly 98 percent of the water in Lake Estes is C-BT water, Colorado River water,” she said. Any “native water” that flows into the lake from the Big Thompson River just passes through, she said — the bureau releases the same amount through the dam, and it flows down the canyon.
So when the Big Thompson, which had been flowing into Lake Estes at 75 to 100 cubic feet per second before the peak of the flooding, suddenly swelled to 5,300 cfs in a 24-hour span, Lamb said the bureau did what it always does — let the water pass through.
“We had no choice,” she said. “We don’t have anywhere else to put that water. We have to pass it through the dam.”
