Spring is having a hard time getting a toehold in the snow. After a few sunny days to remind us that it’s still possible, this has been another cold and blustery week. There is some melting. The flat ground is still completely snow-covered in my neighborhood, but I can see the fences again. In fact, the top half of most of the fences along the highway is poking up with the wires broken and sagging from the weight. The potguts have come out of hibernation and are looking for something to eat, and along the edges of the roads, there are the beginnings of something green. They are easy pickings for the redtail hawks. The south facing slopes along the roads are bare, and if you squint just right, there is some green beginning to show. There are buds on some the aspen trees. So it will come, but it all feels a couple of weeks late. It’s really not all that far off schedule. We just haven’t had a real winter for a few years, and got used to the idea of Round Valley trails being dry in March.
The melt has been pretty gradual so far, and that’s a good thing. There have been some flooding problems in the fields between Kamas and Francis, where the valley has looked like a lake at times. That’s some lower elevation side canyons melting off quickly and hitting clogged and undersized culverts.
One of the impacts of growth is more hard-surfaced area, and more hard-surfaced area means the water flows instead of soaking in. Culverts that handled spring runoff for the last 50 years are suddenly too small to handle the runoff from new rooftops, driveways and streets that might be a mile away. And that gets complicated by the multiple jurisdictions involved. The runoff from a new subdivision in Francis overwhelms a culvert in unincorporated Summit County and floods homes in Kamas. The water doesn’t much care about municipal boundaries, and jurisdictional lines don’t pay much attention to gravity. So far the water seems to have been mostly in open fields, though I’m sure a few houses have ended up with mud in the yard and maybe water inside. There have been some close calls.
The same kind of thing has happened in neighborhoods all over the county. Fortunately it’s been on a pretty manageable scale and it doesn’t seem like a big problem until it’s your house. The Ranch Place neighborhood took some damage which was minimized by a quick response by the neighborhood and Fire District. The sewer district has asked people to make sure they aren’t running sump pumps into the sewer system because it can’t handle that much additional flow. Instead, sump pumps should be installed to pump water out of your crawl space and dump it on the ground so it can percolate back into your crawl space. It’s kind of a losing battle unless you can get it into a storm drain. Not that there are any sump pumps to be bought anyway.
There are different kinds of flooding. There’s the high ground water that just comes up and swamps septic systems and crawl spaces. You step out of bed in the morning and find wet carpet. There’s the small stream flooding that puts water out in yards and streets where it doesn’t belong, but doesn’t affect large areas or cause a lot of damage. Sandbags can prevent or control a lot of that, steering it back into the channel or at least away from the buildings. And then there is the nasty stuff when rivers jump their banks or trees get clogged under bridges. So far, that hasn’t happened, but the big runoff is still a month away.
Last week I watched the Salt Lake TV coverage of flooding on Emigration Creek in Sugarhouse. The area affected is where I grew up. The first house my parents owned was in the evacuation zone. They moved from there into a bigger house down the street, which was on higher ground and not affected. Watching the stream flowing down 17th South and then 15th East, past the houses of childhood friends and through the church parking lot to a gulley we used to play in, was kind of surreal. It was a highly functional neighborhood all those years ago, and from the look of the neighbors working together to divert the flows, it still is.
Years ago, the Weber River flooded through Oakley. The damage was pretty significant, but could have been much, much worse. If you are going to have a flood, Oakley is a pretty good place to do it — it seemed like everybody in town had a trackhoe or front end loader. The ability to immediately muster a fleet of big equipment and guys who know how to run it prevented a lot of damage.
When push comes to shove, nature is going to do what it’s going to do, and we have built our houses in vulnerable areas. We can all keep an eye on things, and make sure the culverts and storm drain inlets around our houses are cleared and flowing freely. Be prepared to help a neighbor if they need it, and move the irreplaceables upstairs just in case.