Lessons Learned Resources
The recommendations in this booklet are made largely through the lens of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, two of the many state agencies that were responsible for managing a long-term flood recovery program for the State of Colorado in the aftermath of the 2013 Colorado Floods. The lessons learned contained within are based on our role of managing the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resource Conservation Service’s (NRCS) Emergency Watershed Protection (EWP) program, a multi-million dollar federal program that is frequently involved in-stream and floodplain “fixes” in the aftermath of federally-declared flood and wildfire disasters. That effort also included management of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Community Development and Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program whom through a first-ever pilot program allowed for funding reach-scale watershed recovery planning and project implementation in order to protect existing housing and infrastructure as well as to provide multiple economic and social benefits to the disaster-stricken communities. 
This is a documentation of the lessons learned during the 2013 Colorado Floods and are broken out into the same categories and phases of disaster recovery as the resources on this website. Each section providing action items or guiding principles for recovery managers to consider including:
Recommendations that will allow state and federal disaster response programs to implement more resilient and holistic recovery actions (noted as Recommendations for Changes to State and Federal Disaster Response).
Actions to implement immediately after a disaster has occurred (noted as Recommendations for Disaster Recovery Actions) and
Action items that can be completed by a community ahead of the next disaster (noted as Recommendations for Pre-Disaster Actions).