And so it begins. Roads in new Kaysville bench subdivisions are washing away and residents are starting to evacuate, and 1700 S in SLC closed to redirect water.
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That poor neighborhood had all sorts of problems last year due to high winds
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Wow. This is one street north of the street where I grew up. We played kid games (army, hide and seek, etc.) in Wasatch Hollow. It’s adjacent to the Wasatch Presbyterian Church there.
In Salt Lake City on Wednesday, 1700 South was closed between 1500 East and 1700 East as crews worked to divert water flowing through Wasatch Hollow, which operates as a detention basin, and onto the street.
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It’s doing what it was designed to do, and doing so nicely. We live close to there so I’m interested to walk by today and check it out.
I’m also going to check the catch basin on the east end of Sunnyside Park, to see if it is coming into play yet on Red Butte Creek.
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So you were one of those hoodlums down there!
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Most of you probably weren’t alive during the summer of 1984, when South State Street had to be turned into a river due to the massive amounts of snow. Alta and Snowbird were open well into July, and skiers from all over the world flew in for late-season skiing. It was awesome.
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The State Street river… Watching a mountain slough off creating a reservoir that took the town of Thistle off the map…a little more intense.
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I remember that one better than the State Street river. Probably because it was so much more dramatic and wiped a town off the map.
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Except it was in 1983, yeah.
Everyone talks about State Street, but 1300 S was easily as impressive. There were 10 ft high berms on either side and I’d guess 6 ft of water working its way west to the Jordan River. Wherever there was a manhole cover for the storm sewer you would see gushers in the middle of the stream. I’ve got pix somewhere. I need to find them.
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There are still remnants of Thistle on US 89 just south of the junction with US 6.
We have some family property in Mt Pleasant and go down through Thistle regularly. If you get a chance to do so, as you are getting off Highway 6, pull off and look at the direction of where the mountain sloughed down and caused the dam that it did. It is astounding the size of that slough that came down - hard to imagine basically a whole section of mountain moving like that.
Also, I haven’t been up Parley’s yet, but there are typically a lot of sloughing areas in there each year, on obviously far less intense water years. I bet there will be some slides there, maybe big enough to get to the highway. I’ve watched a couple of sloughs there and it is a crazy thing to see - and those are relatively small scale.
Back to Mt Pleasant - the above mentioned property has a small cabin on it, and most of those hills in Mt Pleasant had significant slides. Proof that my father-in-law is the luckiest man alive (I have stories) one HUGE slide came down, right past his cabin within a few feet. The slide covered the road to access his property but also concealed it from any viewing eyes. You have to know where it is to find it. Which makes it very secluded and very cool. It also exposed a natural spring and made a small pond on his property that if he wanted to he could use for a small hydroelectric generator to power the cabin.
In his case the slide was actually a good thing. I hope he remains lucky.
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The torrent down 17th S last night at Wasatch Hollow was amazing. Along with many others, I helped stack sandbags at the intersection of 15th e and 17th S. The pond at Watch Hollow had to be 15-20 feet deep, and stretched almost back to clayton jr high.
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You forgot to mention the half–submerged house that is still standing right next to Highway 89. I can’t help staring at it for a second every time I drive by.
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In my neck of the woods in Sandy we had a sand bagging party where the city mayor showed up. Hard work but we have lots of sand bags laying about… and no water yet. We are along the little willow creek.
I was going to sand bag the rainwater puddle at the end of my neighbor’s driveway for a joke but I’m too mature to actually do that.
After about five hours of bagging sand with plenty more to go, I can’t decide if having no flood is the worst case or best case scenario after all that work.
Remember when Rick Majerus was the greatest sandbagger in the NCAA?
Who prayed for all this water anyway?
Just remember this – getting rid of sandbags saturated with water is twice as much work as placing dry ones. Just hope they stay dry.
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Feel bad for these home owners. Obviously someone messed up the evaluation of the safety of building there.
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I suspect there’s going to be at least 1 lawsuit vs the builders/engineers/and govt entities that approved those homes.
Not sure it takes a brain scientist or rocket surgeon to know that steep terrain plus water equals problems.
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What many around here fail to realize is those hillsides are frequently old Lake Bonneville sandbars. That inherently makes them susceptible to something like this. Also, in this case, it looks like there was fill dirt used on that side of the street. I doubt it was well compacted when they dug the foundations.
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A major factor in destruction of homes in the Northridge earthquake (Los Angeles) in 1994 was soil liquefaction. We lived through that, and it was quite obvious that homes built in new developments on hillsides during the prior 10 or 15 years fared the worst, and many were destroyed. Older homes built in earlier times on the flat, stable plane of the San Fernando Valley did quite well. My guess is we’re seeing the same phenomenon in Draper.
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