LONGMONT — City manager Harold Dominguez said he got a call from Dale Rademacher, Longmont’s director of public works and natural resources, about 11:50 p.m. Wednesday. Shortly after, the two of them were on a conference call with the city’s emergency manager, Dan Eamon. By 2:30 a.m. Thursday, Longmont’s Emergency Operations Center was up and running on the second floor of the Safety and Justice Center.

By 8:30 a.m., Dominguez had declared a state of emergency in the city.

“This is a 500-year flood event, so this is a more serious event than we thought we would ever see,” said Eamon, as he and Dominguez took a brief break from running things in the EOC late Thursday afternoon.

The EOC has a phone bank where city staffers can field calls from the public so the 911 lines were left to emergencies. So many calls were coming in Thursday that they were forced to add a second bank of call-takers, Eamon said. Aside from the 15 or so call center operators, there were another 25 to 30 people representing just about every department in the city fielding calls and directing the city’s response out in the field.

Around the city, personnel were helping at the evacuation shelters and police and fire crews spent a busy day evacuating people, blocking off streets and generally keeping people out of the extreme danger posed by the fast-moving floodwaters.

“Some of the people working here have homes in the neighborhoods” being evacuated, Dominguez said at the EOC.

“We realize there’s an emotional component to this,” he said. “We realize that when we ask people to evacuate we understand that we’re asking them to leave something that’s very close to them, and that’s their homes.”

Eamon said that aside from the Longmont Emergency Unit helping out with traffic, it was primarily city personnel dealing with the disaster response because the whole region was being affected by flooding.

Dominguez credited Eamon’s preparation and the response from Longmont’s police and fire crews. He also credited the school district for stepping up, not just for providing buses to be used for evacuees but also for opening Silver Creek High School as an evacuation shelter for a number of hours. Thursday evening, Silver Creek was evacuated and Niwot High became the new evacuation spot.

Dominguez said late Thursday that officials were concerned because they didn’t believe the waters had crested. The National Weather Service was keeping its flash flood warning in effect until10:15 a.m. Friday. A 70 percent chance of showers — sometimes heavy — was being predicted overnight and there was a 40 percent chance of showers and, after noon, thundershowers Friday.

“And we’re in a different place than we were at this time yesterday,” Dominguez said Thursday. “The fields are saturated.”

Sometime Thursday night, Eamon said, he was planning to switch out the EOC and bring in some new folks to man operations there.

“This is something that’s not going to end today,” Eamon said.

Tony Kindelspire can be reached at 303-684-5291 or at tkindelspire@times-call.com.