GLENWOOD SPRINGS – Ann Martin awoke to the nightmare she thought would come ever since the Coal Seam fire burned past her house two months ago.
An emergency-room nurse, Martin was sleeping before her graveyard shift Monday night when the sky unleashed heavy rains in a sudden downpour.
The rains scoured mud, boulders and logs from burned-over slopes and washed them down Mitchell Creek Road in West Glenwood Springs in a waist-deep river of muck that reeked of ashen earth.
“It wasn’t just raining. It was the worst rain I’ve ever seen,” said the 40-year-old Martin. “It was a raging torrent on our driveway.”
Forced to evacuate, Martin drove into that torrent, evading rocks and branches as the mud overtook her station wagon. Her daughter Audra, 18, driving a pickup truck behind her, watched as the flow shoved Martin’s car across the road and left it pivoting above a ditch filling with mud.
“It was scary,” Audra said. “I just kept watching her car go to the side, to the side.”
About 300 West Glenwood evacuees were allowed to return to their homes Tuesday afternoon, while officials watched the skies for storms that threatened to bring even heavier flooding.
The flow that nearly killed Martin may have actually saved her. Washed against piling boulders, her car stayed wedged along the roadside while she climbed through the window to escape.
“I thought it would push me across the bank and I would die in the mud,” she said.
Moments later, Glenwood police Lt. Lou Vallario and Rick Kolecki, a state Division of Wildlife official who works at a nearby fish hatchery, waded past boulders and logs to walk them to safety.
“You just do what you gotta do,” Vallario said, his suede cowboy boots and blue jeans caked with mud.
Officials figure they got off easy this time. No one was injured in the mudslides. Damage was limited to a few buried cars and some muddy basements.
Monday’s rains never even reached the upper slopes of the burn area, leaving much more debris ready to flow and saturated soils prone to give way.
“It’s by no means over,” Garfield County Sheriff Tom Dalessandri said. “It did not just clear its throat.”
As front-end loaders filled dump trucks with mud to clear west Glenwood roads, Martin returned to her car Tuesday morning, where it remained pressed against the roadside pinned by boulders, its doors coated in mud.
She cried.
“Driving down the road, it was horrible,” she said. “I was terrified. Petrified.”
The car sat amid a 50-foot swath of mud from a nearby canyon. The torrent wiped out wooden fence rails and broke apart barbed wire.
Nearby, it knocked over three 10-foot-long concrete barriers set up to try to steer the floods. Mud flowed past a log cabin, where a basketball hoop rose above a driveway of muck, an SUV left buried up to its wheels.
