Dogs splashed in large puddles Tuesday inside Optimist Park. These puddles were left in the wake of this week’s flooding of the Laramie River. The dogs’ owners stood in dry sections of the park’s green field.
The park, along with a number of streets such as Curtis, Hodgeman and Spruce — on Laramie’s West neighborhood – was left partly underwater Monday as the river crested along the Green Belt, said Mike Zook, parks manager for the City of Laramie.
Close to 1200 volunteers consisting of WyoTech students, local members of the Mormon Church and other groups worked with community emergency response teams to lay sandbags and perform other duties. The goal on Monday was to hold back the water from West Side homes, said Sandra Newland, emergency manager for the City of Laramie.
Newland said that 250 tons of dirt was used to construct a make-shift levee in order to divert water away from affected areas, and an estimated 22,000 sandbags were placed to protect housing.
Most of the volunteers worked in the West Side where the worst flooding occurred. “The volunteers were concentrated around Optimist Park,” he said.
In addition to the West Side, both the areas surrounding Lee’s and Sunny Meadows trailer parks experienced flooding on Monday, Newland said.
The flood came as a result of a combination of the heavy rain fall last weekend, late-season snowstorms and the melting snowpack in the area’s mountains, Zook said. The tributaries (smaller rivers) that feed into the Laramie are at 100 percent capacity.
“All the rivers were very full,” Zook said.
The overflowing water from the Laramie River began to encroach upon the area around the Green Belt in the early hours of Monday morning, when city entities began to receive calls concerning the flood, Newland said.
“We first started getting notifications around 4 a.m.,” she said.
The responders who were first on scene to South Spruce Street arrived to find that a seeming river had formed in the alleyway behind the houses along the street, Newland said.
20 West Side homes were breached by the water on Monday and 40 homes were in some way affected by the flood, Newland said.
A number of streets surrounding Optimist Park remain closed as a result of the flood.
While city officials were aware that the river’s water was rising, Newland said she and other city employees were “astonished” by how much and how fast the water rose from the river’s banks.
“We couldn’t believe it,” she said.
As early as next week materials used to protect property and divert flood waters—such as the sandbags and the dirt levee—may be removed if flood waters from the Laramie River continue to go down, Zook said.
“It’s starting to recede now. It’s coming down significantly,” he said.
While the water levels are currently decreasing, Zook warned that if the temperature gets too warm or if heavy rainfall returns, the river may flood again in the near future.
“It could be significant if it warms up,” he said.