Some Colo. facilities appear to have fared well in flooding

As flood waters brutalized parts of his community back home, the executive director of a Boulder, Colo., transitional-living program for young adults in recovery took comfort in the news that the worst effects of heavy rains were expected to subside after just a day or two for his clients and staff.

“It’s one of those ‘life on life’s terms’ deals,” executive director Michael Ferrell of Northstar Transitions said matter-of-factly this afternoon from Massachusetts, where he was attending the annual Cape Cod Symposium on Addictive Disorders on an unsettled but comparatively calm New England weather day. “We’re not operating as normal today—we probably had to skip a UA or not help our clients with job applications because many of the businesses in town are closed—but all this is relatively minor.”

Northstar Transitions serves around 8 to 15 male and female young adults (ages 18 to 35) who have recently been housed in a primary treatment program; the individuals live in apartments that are managed by Northstar and scattered across Boulder. Access to 12-Step meetings and other recovery-focused activities likely will be compromised for a day or two as a number of roads remain closed in the flood-torn city, but Ferrell says he expects that as the rain subsides, the situation should return to business as usual fairly quickly.

“Our clients probably experience this the same as anybody else would,” Ferrell says in reference to the potential anxiety that events such as this generates. “It’s stressful not even to be able to go to the grocery store.”

Ferrell says he also spoke today with the director of Aim House, another Boulder-based support program, and outside of its temporarily closing an art gallery where some of its program clients hone their work skills, there appear to have been few major effects of the storm felt in that organization as well.

Rollie Fisher, business development supervisor at the Center for Dependency, Addiction & Rehabilitation (CeDAR), says operations in the Aurora treatment program were minimally affected because none of its campus facilities incurred damage. The main impacts there involved sending home non-essential employees on Thursday afternoon and canceling some Thursday evening activities.

As of early Friday evening, four deaths in Colorado had been attributed to the widespread rains and flooding.