As flood anniversary approaches, Jamestown home seals town’s healing

Aug. 3--One of the most visible wounds Jamestown suffered in the devastating flood of 2013, and certainly the longest lasting, is finally on its way to healing.

The home of Jyoti Sharp, at 175 Main St., was sawed in half by the raging floodwaters that roared down from the hills and the James Creek drainage the second week of September 2013, forever altering the course of James Creek, leaving it as pretty much a coin toss whether the house could even be salvaged.

And due to a series of unexpected hurdles she had to get over to repair it, its wreckage sat for five years square in the center of this close-knit community of some 250 people, a brutal reminder of the traumatic events nearly six years ago that included the death of beloved town elder Joey Howlett.

But fresh Tyvek now wraps the walls of the rebuilt home, a spacious south-facing deck now overlooks the pools and riffles of the re-engineered and restored James Creek, and the general contractor expects that Sharp, who bought a second home just west of town in the wake of the flood, can reclaim occupancy this fall.

"Everyone I meet in town is just so happy, not just for me, I think, but also for the town, because it's been, like you said, such a reminder of the floods that happened almost six years ago," Sharp said, seated in the living room of her newer home on Overland Road.

Boulder resident Randy Zahn is the supervisor on the rebuilding job for general contractor Gavin Bell. He was on the job site Thursday and gave a visitor a walking tour of the ongoing project.

"People walk by here, and they thank me for building it. They are happy. They are excited," Zahn said. "The community is behind it. They're glad to see it moving so fast."

It may be doing so now, but it was a long haul just to get to the starting line.

Sharp joked that when she told a friend the home's progress might be reported in the news, her friend said, "I can see the headlines now. 'Last home in Boulder County to be rebuilt.' I was like, 'Yeah, how do you spell procrastination?'"

To another friend, she had said, "I hope people aren't upset that it took so long. And he laughed and said, 'Oh Jyoti, people can't stay angry that long.'"

Delays, setbacks

One obstacle she faced is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency made her a buyout offer, which she considered. Had she accepted, no one would have been permitted to rebuild there.

"But then, their offer was so low. It was ridiculously low," Sharp said. "But a lot of my neighbors took that option."

Additionally, Sharp said, "Habitat for Humanity was going to help me rebuild and provide a loan for the difference in what I got from insurance. And then they backed out very unexpectedly. So that was a setback."

Flatirons Habitat For Humanity Executive Director Susan Lythgoe said it was true that the organization looked at options for assisting on Sharp's property with Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Relief with funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development -- as it did for several other homes in Jamestown -- but that it was not true Habitat backed out "unexpectedly."

Rather, Lythgoe said, it was a matter of there not being a place to locate a septic system that would not be in the floodway.

Another delay concerned Boulder County's redrawing of the floodplain mapping for her area. Initially, it appeared her home would be within the 100-year floodplain, in which case its ground floor would have been uninhabitable, she said. Then-Jamestown mayor Tara Schoedinger advised her to wait on completion of the floodplain remapping -- and when that was finished, thanks in part to extensive flood mitigation engineering out the back door on James Creek, she was now out of the 100-year floodplain.

Like everyone who suffered through the 2013 flood, Sharp's memories of its destruction are vivid. She had sunk about $100,000 into the residence just a few months before the flood, in order to create living space for herself on the ground floor, with the second floor outfitted to accommodate short-term renters. The night that it was cleanly cleaved by the floodwaters, Sept. 12, she had already been evacuated up the hill to the nearby Jamestown Elementary School.

"When I woke up the next morning after a fitful night's sleep -- I think all of us had a fitful night's sleep, because the school was starting to flood, too, and we were all sleeping on mats, trying to stay out of the water -- when I woke up the next morning my neighbors greeted me with hugs and condolences. Because they had already seen that my house had gone down, overnight."

Friends walked her out to a bluff overlooking the heart of town, and she could see that, like many, her life been turned upside down by forces beyond anyone's control.

Gratitude

Construction supervisor Zahn said he has seen, just in the few months he has been working there, that even in a routine heavy rain, "The water that comes down off that road (Main Street) is phenomenal."

Zahn said that he and Bell, the general contractor, met in Jamestown back in the 1970s, and share many good memories of those days. His own longtime familiarity with the town adds to his sensitivity about the project's importance not just to Sharp, but to all her neighbors.

"We're making (design) decisions not based on what Jyoti needs now, but what the community might need," Zahn said. As he stood outside the home's east side, facing toward the popular nearby Jamestown Mercantile, he said the builders are considering factors such as "how she relates to the community, on this side. That's now one of our concerns -- and how the property transitions to grade."

When the project is complete, it will feature a master bedroom, kitchen and living room with propane fireplace on the ground floor where Sharp will reside, plus three bedrooms, an office and kitchen upstairs, which will be available for short- and longer-term rentals.

Sharp has been living during her forced exile in her beautiful second home, with breathtaking views of the high country landscape, which she bought nearby on much higher ground outside town after the flood. That's the same home that promptly suffered $40,000 in damage when it was rented for the weekend to six people, who threw a memorable weekend high school rager there for 250 of their closest friends, charging $15 admission, and eventually earning two Fairview High students -- the bacchanal's organizers -- convictions for felony trespassing.

But that is perhaps a story for another day. Sharp -- whose first name is her "spirit name," she said, derived from jyotis, the Sanskrit word for "light of the sun" -- said she is filled, nearly six years after the disaster that ravaged her home, her town, and much of the northern Front Range, with gratitude.

"Wouldn't have come this far without so many incredible people and acts of kindness along the way... the volunteers who came from every direction, the grit of neighbors who lived through their own losses and kept persevering, the love and care of my family & friends, but most of all Mayor Tara," she wrote in an email. "She's the one who got all of us through to the other side."

And now, she is looking forward to moving back down to her primary residence in town when its rebirth is completed this fall.

"I've lived up here five years now. It's beautiful up here," she said of her home on Overland Road. "But the quiet and the solitude has an edge to it, especially in the winter. It's too isolated.

"So, I want to be among my people again. My community."

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