The Moffat Tunnel is a railroad and water tunnel that cuts through the Continental Divide in north-central Colorado. Named after Colorado railroad pioneer David Moffat, the tunnel's first official railroad traffic passed through in February 1928. wikipedia 
It is one of several tunnels that divert water from the Western Slope to the Front Range in Colorado.
Water politics is A Big Deal™ out here in the Wild West.
Where Denver Gets Its Water article
John Wesley Powell Had a Plan for Developing the West, But Nobody Listened. Divide the states up by watersheds. Smithsonian Magazine article npr Washington Post article
Image source: Colorado State University page on Watershed Management. Copied 2026-04-22. page
The city of Pueblo had been a major railroad hub early in Colorado's history. It was politically powerful enough to block the development of the Moffat Tunnel until the 1921 flood which devastated the city. Rocky Mountain PBS documentary, The Great Pueblo Flood, 100 years later. There are two videos on this page. The details about the Moffat Tunnel are briefly mentioned at about 46min in the second video: page
The same video continues, explaining the powers established in law in order to empower extraordinary flood mitigation measures to protect Pueblo from future catastrophic flooding.
TODO: connect this experience with flooding in Pueblo to the 2013 flood in Boulder County where the City of Boulder fared so much better than the City of Lyons.