In 1965, eastern Colorado experienced major flash flooding. This report compares the warning process of ten communities in the northeast and southeast quadrants of Colorado, including their institutional response and time of warnings and confirmation of those warnings for both official agencies and the general public. Comparisons are made between warning time, organizational preparedness, and response to similar flooding situations in each of the ten communities, with varying success rates among the towns. The case studies are examined using a theory of warning systems and processes, which breaks the warning process into three phases: evaluation, alert, and confirmation. For each of the cases, there was no phase of evaluation, but there were differing times between alert, confirmation, and initial flooding.
