Colorado’s stunning natural beauty makes it a wonderful setting for the University of Colorado’s four campuses. Yet natural beauty also poses risk at times.
We have experienced our share of nature’s wrath in recent years, and it has had both direct and indirect impacts on our campuses. In September, raging floodwaters devastated communities along Colorado’s Front Range, damaging our flagship campus in Boulder and causing havoc on our Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, east of Denver. In each of the past two summers, marauding wildfires have crept dangerously close to our Colorado Springs campus and to Boulder.
The direct effects to our campuses have been minimal. September’s flooding did minor damage to many buildings on our Boulder campus; it closed for two days amid the calamity. Our Colorado Springs campus also closed during wildfires because of choking smoke. Despite minimal infrastructure interruptions, however, the larger impact on our campuses and communities has been substantial: students, faculty, and staff displaced; employees’ homes destroyed; academics interrupted; families uprooted.
Yet the challenges that come with natural disasters also give colleges and universities an opportunity to draw on a resource that is not articulated in any emergency response plan: a sense of community.
Community takes many forms when disaster strikes. The campus community is inherently a place where people come together. While disaster triggers formal emergency-response plans in areas such as academics, housing and food service, human resources, and counseling and student services, it is often the intangibles of community that carry the day.
Our students stepped up to aid in recovery efforts in their communities, from clearing debris to repairing hiking trails. September’s flooding in Boulder led us to cancel a football game against Fresno State. Yet our student-athletes didn’t take the day off. They joined classmates in distributing to those in need food that would have been consumed at the game. And in a classy move, our friends from Fresno State raised money for flood recovery.
We coordinated with emergency-response agencies such as the American Red Cross and connected them with students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends who wanted to provide hands-on help.
The University of Colorado board of regents had a keen interest in efforts during the fires and flood. I provided the board timely written updates of events as they unfolded, and as they moved faster (as was the case during the floods), we quickly organized conference calls so the board could stay apprised of damages and recovery efforts.
We also engaged our alumni and donor communities, who responded with a strong desire to help, resulting in a disaster recovery fund. The fund has received some $217,000 for students, faculty, and staff who lost possessions in the flooding or whose homes were damaged or destroyed.
One of the larger forms community takes during disaster is the relationship between our campuses and the cities they call home. Relationships previously developed with police, firefighters, emergency responders, and social workers served us well when crises hit. We also opened our facilities as evacuation centers, staging areas, and temporary classrooms. During the Colorado Springs fires, we not only housed and fed first responders (with faculty members helping to serve food), we also made our facilities available to our friends at the nearby U.S. Air Force Academy, which had been evacuated.
Mostly we tried to do what good neighbors always do—be there to help those in need when they most need it. We are a part of our communities, not apart from them.
Emergency planning and preparedness are essential before floods or fires or hurricanes or tornadoes strike. Equally important is an understanding that we’re all in this together, and that our campuses are communities unto themselves as well as part of the larger whole. When we address disaster with this mindset, we emerge together—stronger, wiser, more human, and more of a community than when we started.
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