An intense and fast-moving storm on June 20, 2024 in Grand Junction caused a massive flood in the Paradise Hills subdivision, filling residents’ homes, back yards, basements and crawl spaces with muddy water, ruining their drywall, carpeting, cupboards and flooring, crashing down fences in yards and drowning backyard chickens. Senior meteorologist Tom Renwick of the National Weather Service in a story on Colorado Public Radio called the storm “incredible.” He said, “We couldn’t see more than maybe five feet out the door. It was remarkable.”
Remarkable, indeed.
One affected resident, Darla Green, attended a Paradise Hills HOA meeting right after the flood and estimated that 60-70 homes were involved and the damage they described cost well over a million dollars.
So far though, Paradise Hills residents have been left totally on their own to recover from what was essentially a man-made flood caused by totally inadequate drainage.
None of the affected homeowners had flood insurance, so they are spending their savings or retirement funds to try to remediate their homes. One owner’s whole first floor was filled with mud, forcing the family to live on the second floor of their home since the flood. Darla Green said she spent $15,000, all of her savings, on cleaning up just her crawl space. She pointed out that crawl space remediation in the area costs more than it might normally be because many owners had radon mitigation measures, like plastic lining and electric fans, in their crawlspaces to keep them ventilated. The flood also rendered a large number Paradise Hills home unsellable because the inadequate drainage poses an ongoing threat of another flood whenever the next big downpour hits. Homeowners are petrified that after spending their savings and retirement funds on remediating the damage from this event, another storm will devastate their homes again.
Google Earth photo of the area affected by the Paradise Hills flood and the drainage that caused the flood (outlined in yellow lines). The storm water flowed off the city-and- county-owned G.J. airport property. The drainage on the residential side adjacent to the Highline Canal starts off big — about 50 feet wide and 20 feet deep — but narrows to just 4-5 feet wide and 3-4 feet deep by the time it hits the first bend, forcing the water and mud that poured off the adjacent desert to spill out into homes in Paradise Hills.
Trying to find help is greatly complicated by all the entities that contributed to the flood and the fractionated nature of the affected areas.
Mud and debris at this abandoned home on Catalina Drive in Paradise Corner shows the height the flood waters reached there on 6/20
The waterline at Jim Ciha’s house on Malibu Drive in Paradise Hills. So far he and his wife have paid $2,100 to get the crawl space cleaned and he admits he had far less damage than many other homeowners in the area. The entire first floor of his neighbor’s house was flooded with muddy water, and those neighbors are now living on the second floor of their home.
The water that flooded Paradise Hills came off the city-and- county-owned Grand Junction Regional Airport. For years the airport has been expanding west towards Paradise Hills and for the last several years its ongoing runway construction project has been altering the topography at the west end of the airport. The June 20 stormwater flowed off airport property into a retention pond the City of Grand Junction built around 2012 on land maintained by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The purpose of the City-built retention pond, according to Chapter 4 of the Airport’s Environmental Assessment for the its runway expansion project, was to protect Paradise Hills from stormwater runoff, but it is clearly failing. After filling the City’s inadequate retention pond, the June 20 stormwater traveled under the Highline Canal through a concrete drainage structure built by the Army Corps of Engineers and into a channel created by the developer of Filing 7 of Paradise Hills, Robert L. Bray and Bray & Company Real Estate, circa 1993-94. The drainage is labeled in the original subdivision plans as “Private Open Space,” making it the property of the Paradise Hills Homeowners Association (HOA), which claims its only mandate is to manage the subdivision’s irrigation system, not any open space or drainages.
Further complicating things, Paradise Hills is made up of more than just one subdivision. Some parts are wholly separate subdivisions, like Paradise Corner, built in 1994 and formerly called “The Moses Subdivision,” which consists of 11 homes off the intersection of Catalina Drive and 26 1/2 Road, and a 4-lot subdivision adjacent to Paradise Corner called North View, built in 1978.
1993 plat map for Paradise Hills Filing #7. Arrows point to the faulty drainage channel (labeled “Tract A”), created by the developer that spilled flood water throughout the neighborhood in the June 20 storm. Note that the drainage channel is labeled “Private Open Space,” while the Paradise Hills HOA seems unaware it owns any private open space.
So far the City of Grand Junction hasn’t lifted a finger to help the affected Paradise Hills homeowners. The Grand Valley Drainage District and Army Corps of Engineers also disavow any responsibility for the flood, and the Department of Local Affairs has been useless despite having a “Disaster Recovery and Resilience Program.” In March, 2024, FEMA started a program to help individual property owners recover from natural disasters, but in order for homeowners to be eligible for it, the President has to declare the area a disaster area, and no government entity has requested it.
Making matters worse, back in 2016 the Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce and Mesa County teamed up to sue the Drainage District to block a $3/month per homeowner stormwater fee the Drainage District had levied to generate funds to beef up stormwater drainage in the area north of the Colorado River. The Chamber and County called it an “unconstitutional tax,” won a court judgment against the Drainage District and forced the District to refund all the money it had collected to homeowners and businesses. After this, no entity in the County ever took any steps to improve the drainage situation in the area, leaving residents facing disaster.
Paradise Hills HOA President Austin Erickson seemed completely unaware that Paradise Hills owns any private open space, telling a KREX-TV reporter on June 26 that “he plans on appearing before Grand Junction City Council to learn who might be responsible for maintaining that creek.”
Given all of the entities that contributed to the flood — the city and the county via ownership of the expanding G.J. Airport adjacent to Paradise Hills, and the Bray realtors who developed Paradise Hills — and all the different entities affected by the flood, including residents of Paradise Hills, Paradise Corner and the North View subdivisions, it’s clear that this is a vastly complicated situation that will take a government to step in and coordinate assistance and modification of the drainage, and help the affected homeowners get help to fund their recovery.
By all rights that entity should be the City as the one unifying entity in all of this.
Grand Junction City code says,
“28.16.120 Drainage facilities maintenance.
An important part of all storm drainage facilities is continued maintenance of the facilities to ensure they will function as designed. Maintenance of drainage facilities includes a number of routine tasks, such as removal of debris and sediment, and nonroutine tasks, such as restoring damaged structures.
All drainage facilities will be maintained to preserve their function, and shall:….
…Be maintained by the property owner, the developer and/or a homeowners’ association. Should the property owner fail to adequately maintain drainage facilities, the right is reserved [by the City] to enter the property, upon proper notice, for the purpose of performing drainage maintenance. All maintenance costs shall be assessed against the owner(s) of the property.”
So under its charter, the City can step in, do the maintenance on the drainage to prevent more damage to homes in Paradise Hills, and then levy the cost of the maintenance against all the homeowners in all the affected subdivisions.
But so far no entity has taken any steps to help the struggling homeowners, even in a non-monetary way. They’re all just turning a blind eye to the homeowners’ plight.
Paradise Hills is in City Council District B, and Jason Nguyen is their City Councilman (970-244-1504 is the City Council Comment Line) and it is in County Commissioner District 2, represented by Commissioner Bobbie Daniel. Her phone number is 970-244-1885 or you can contact her with this contact form.
Affected homeowner Jim Ciha took the video below of the flood in his backyard on June 20. He admits the damage he sustained to his yard, fence and crawlspace were far less than that other homeowners incurred:
For those who remember- the GJ drainage district was kind of a disaster in how they came after money. The sent bills with people not knowing why they were getting charged. I got sent to collections even though I had a check they cashed and that was a fiasco. Their lack of communication was what got them in trouble along with the lack of government support. They are not completely innocent here.
Eventually homeowners will talk to lawyers and may sue many possible defendants and may recover some damages. It was the Chamber of Commerce led by Diane Schwenke and County Commissioners who gutted the drainage district and eventually this had to happen.
Publius II is correct.