A Historians Perspective: Gordon Hazard
Gordon Hazard is the President of the Fort Collins Historical Society. He has lived in Fort Collins for over 47 years. He attended, worked, and retired from Colorado State University. Over the last few years, Hazard has thrown himself into Fort Collins history. He has even co-authored the book CSU’s Sense of Place with James Hansen and Linda Meyer. Hazard knows all about Fort Collins History so I gave him a call for more insight on our natural disasters.
Aissata: I know that during the 1997 Spring Creek flood, the Morgan Library was heavily damaged. Is that mentioned in the book?
Gordon: Yeah, very damaged. I was working on campus at the time. And that’s one that I remember, personally, I’ve got a lot of, you know, firsthand stories, because I, I was that was one that took place in front of my eyes.
Gordon: We’ve had a lot of rain and flood and that kind of stuff has been impacting the city over the years, that’s probably been our biggest thing is either, you know, heavy snows or rain that turned into a flood or just flooding and things like that. We’ve got a pretty good history of that.
Aissata: The 97 flood must be a prime example of that?
Gordon: Yeah, you know, of course. The 97 one was the last, what I call the real big one. We had multiple ones before that, you know. The 1864 one was what actually founded the city.
Aissata: The Camp Collins Flood, correct?
Gordon: Yeah. That, that actually, that was kind of our starter, was the first flood that flooded out the camp up in Laporte and then they sent down the troops to try to find higher ground. And that’s where we ended up with Camp Collins and then Fort Collins. That’s right down there where Old Town is now, is where they actually set up the first camp, it was just a little bit higher above the river.
Aissata: And we’ve had many other floods after that, right?
Gordon: Yeah, in 1904 we had a major flood in 1938, 1951, and then the big one in 1997. The one in 1904, that took out bridges and things and flooded the area pretty badly. And then 1938 was the one that really first affected the campus. And then we had one in 1951 that flooded buildings on the campus. And then it wasn’t until 1997 when we had that flood that flooded a lot of buildings on campus, the Morgan Library, the Student Center, the Clark building, every building all got a lot of water.
Aissata: Have measures been taken to ensure that the buildings don’t get flooded in again or are we just waiting to see?
Gordon: Well, there’s no making sure of anything. They have taken a lot of mitigation, particularly after the 1997 flood. If you look over there in front of Johnson Hall, and you’ll notice that you have berms now, where you actually have to walk up the stairs and down the stairs to get into the building. Those were all built-in after the 97 flood.
Aissata: The 1997 flood must have been really impactful to cause all of this change?
Gordon: Oh, it was huge. Dollar-wise, it ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Basically, it was one of those before and after type events. It was a big enough event where it did enough damage to where they had financial losses. Fortunately, they were insured. So the insurance came in to help pay for the repairs and stuff. it’s kind of forced them to put in some of those berms and various devices to try to keep water out of some of the key buildings. You know, I think that was kind of the idea that they said, we’ve got some very key buildings, we want to keep water out completely if we can.
Aissata: What about the other ones?
Gordon: Well, instead of putting offices in a basement, as they used to where professors would have an office down in the basement. In those offices, they would have all their books and things that they collected all their lives. The Eddy building was a great example. Several philosophy professors had offices in the basements when the flood-hit and basically they lost everything that they had collected. So the idea is now we’ve got a classroom in the basement and we’ve put the offices up on higher floors because you can much more easily repair a classroom with new seats. They discovered that the amount of loss in the offices was irreplaceable, with classrooms down there you can just go out and buy new tables and chairs.
Aissata: So I know you’re talking about how professors lost a lot of their things. What else did you see?
Gordon: Oh, it was just absolutely horrible for so many professors that were there. I know, I can’t remember the professor’s name but he was really into Asian Studies and philosophy and he had spent his life collecting books, manuscripts, artwork, and other things that he all has in his little office and it was all gone. Literally in a blink of the eye.
Aissata: Heartbreaking
Gordon: Absolutely, the basement of the student center up, until the night of July 28th, 1987, had a 12 lane bowling alley on campus.
Aissata: No way!
Gordon: Gone. They never replaced the bowling alley. I’ve given Mike Ellis a little bit of a hard time over it when they did the remodel. They looked into it but decided it was too expensive to do so, no bowling alley. The whole basement of the student center got flooded to a point where it was right up to the ceiling, literally. And fortunately, we lost no lives that night though that could have easily happened. Fortunately, the only people that were in there when the floodwaters broke in, were a handful of staff members that knew how to get to the back stairways and get up to the second up to the floor
Aissata: How long did it take the campus to recover from the Spring Creek Flood?
Gordon: We shut down, the library and the Student Center were shut down for the better part of the year. It wasn’t until 1998 where we started to have the Student Center open completely. And it took about two years because a lot of that required projects that they had to do to get the buildings back operational. In the summer of 98 and 99, that’s when they went in, and basically, they reengineered the whole West lawn, they took it from a flat level area and started bringing in dirt, they brought in lots of that dirt to make those hills that we now know as the west lawn of the Student Center. And so I would say as they were still doing stuff with all that mitigation, it took them probably two to three years before they were pretty well completed with what they were planning on doing.
Aissata: The 1864 flood also caused some lasting change as well, right? The town moved away from where it originally was.
Gordon: In many ways, a flood started Fort Collins. Fort Collins could probably hang its hat on rain and floods as its key moments.
Aissata: It seems like the flood caused a lot of damage. Did the 1979 Hail Storm also cause a lot of damage or was it mainly the floods?
Gordon: I was on campus when the 79 hailstorm hit and I absolutely remember what happened firsthand. It was in the afternoon, we had those clouds coming in and they pelted us. They weren’t pea-sized hail either, they were softball-sized, absolutely humongous. I mean, I’ve never seen a hailstorm like it ever since and I hope I never do. I mean it was literally you know, the damage was, literally every roof in town had to be replaced. I mean it was a hailstorm the size of a baseball or softball and it lasted for probably 20 minutes. Some people actually had hailstorm stones that got inside of their house.
Aissata: And a baby died, unfortunately, correct?
Gordon: We had one death on that one, there was a little baby yeah, her mother was in a car that was starting to get pelted by hail, and the mother kind of freaked out and grabbed the baby and tried to run to a building. Unfortunately, a hailstone happened to hit this little baby and killed it.
Aissata: Heartbreaking.
Gordon: Yeah, it came out of nowhere. You know, it got dark and it started raining and the next thing you know it started to hail. And not just little pellets but we got hit with monster hail. I remember I had a pickup truck out in the parking lot, I was lucky that I didn’t lose any glass but boy did I have damage. I had dents all over, some other cars had windows broken. And that was when the Denver Broncos had their training site down in Dove Valley, they used to train up here before the season and there were a couple of guys who had come to the Student Center for dinner. And one guy, he had more money than he knew what to do with, so he got himself a fancy Porsche that had a glass moon roof on it. The moon roof was shattered and he had hailstones melting on the leather seats in his car and he was standing up there crying.
Aissata: I would cry too if my brand new expensive car was damaged by a freak hailstorm.
Gordon: Yeah, I didn’t blame the guy, I’d cry too
Aissata: I recently wrote an article about why we should plan for the worst when we live in Fort Collins because of our natural disasters, do you agree with this?
Gordon: I wouldn’t say we need an evacuation plan, I don’t think we live in a place where this stuff happens frequently enough to warrant drastic plans but yeah you need a first aid kit and a flashlight maybe some cans of food and water just in case you get trapped somewhere. You know we’re really lucky in Fort Collins cause all our electrical stuff is underground so we don’t lose power like those coastal cities but people need to still be prepared.
Aissata: I didn’t know much about these natural disasters before I started doing research, do you think if more people were aware of the history they would be more prepared.
Gordon: Absolutely, you’ve got to learn from history. If you don’t learn from history, history will repeat itself. We know where the floodplains are in Colorado so we need to know where our houses are located in regards to the floodplains.
For the full interview transcript with Gordon Hazard please contact Aissata Watt at aissata@colostate.edu
