… Around dinner time on July 31, 1976, a storm system stalled high in the sky above the center of the canyon, which stretches between Estes Park and Loveland. Over the course of an hour, the clouds unleashed more than 7 inches of rain, swelling the river encased in the narrow canyon by a foot every three minutes. By the end of the storm the following day, the system had dumped the equivalent of the area’s normal yearly rainfall on the canyon. … The 1976 flood was one in a series of disasters that prompted the creation of incident command centers — which serve as a central hub for decision-making for all agencies responding to a crisis. … The emergency system in the 1970s was primarily focused on nuclear threats … and then expanded to encompass floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and other disasters.