CEDAR CITY — As the summer monsoon season approaches, government officials in Iron County are proactively preparing for possible flooding and are asking area residents to do the same.
Iron County engineer Richard Wilson said the county has been working with Cedar City and Enoch officials regularly regarding flood preparation and mitigation efforts.
During a recent coordinating meeting, he said, officials developed a list that shows “who’s taking what in case of flooding.”
“So that everybody knows where they’re going when flooding happens, whether they’re at the Woodbury split, whether they’re on road crossings or wherever … who’s up the canyon,” he said. “So we don’t have everybody at one location. They’ll all be already assigned and distributed.”
Wilson said the county has gone through and made sure all of the major canals and drainage ditches are free of boulders, rocks, trees, mud and other debris.
Some areas that were cleared out, he noted, can’t be physically enlarged to make them accommodate more water.
“The channels are as much as we can do,” Wilson said. “We don’t have the room to widen them, nor do we have the room to cause the banks to get any higher.”
“We have cleaned every ditch,” he added, citing Coal Creek, Shirts Creek and other main drainages.
As for what residents can do to make sure their own property’s drainage is adequate to handle flooding, Wilson recommended visualizing where water would likely come onto your property and where it would leave, keeping in mind that water within the Cedar Valley tends to flow from the southeast to the northwest.
“We think it would be great if people went out to where their driveway crosses into their property and make sure their crossover culvert is clean, or adequate to transport water from in front of their house to the next house,” Wilson said. “Also, if they’ve got a ditch or something, is it full of weeds? Is it just going to catch more debris?
“I also think they should look at their backyards, because a lot of backyards face uphill. And as we found in Enoch (last summer), it didn’t come around to your front door until it already passed through your backyard.”
“And, if you’ve got a foot of water on your property, how would it leave your yard before entering your house?” Wilson added
Residents must also be mindful of where the water would go next, he said.
“The law says that you are responsible for directing water in a safe manner that doesn’t damage someone else’s property,” he said, adding that a drain in a typical residence might only be able to handle 5 cubic feet per second.
“So if you’re getting 25 cfs, the water is going to have to pool until it catches up. It’s all about prevention. You want to prevent it from coming into your home,” he said.
Wilson also advised residents to check their basement window wells to make sure they stick up at least 4-6 inches from the ground.
“That would help,” he said. “Water may still seep in, but it’s not going to flow right inside. And you can add 6 more inches of sandbags, easily.”
In late June, before the summer’s first storm forecast, many Iron County residents gathered to preemptively fill sandbags. They may be taken by whoever needs them, Wilson said. The filled sandbags are stored on pallets on the north side of the road, just east of the Iron County Search and Rescue facility on Kitty Hawk Drive, at approximately 1100 West.
Additionally, more than 100,000 empty bags are at the site waiting to be filled with sand as needed, Wilson said.
Looking ahead, Wilson said the county is in the process of doing a formal study on the lower Coal Creek drainage, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“Which is a big deal, to kind of nail down where issues are,” he said.
Wilson said the county is also working on a half-dozen improvement projects in an effort to utilize the federal emergency funds they received last year, which must be spent by Jan. 1, 2023.
Those projects, he said, include a detention basin near Kanarraville, improvements to the canal near Ladybug Nursery off Westview Drive and improving drainages near 3000 North.
“How to keep the water from being trapped in Flying L Phase 1, because last year it had nowhere to go,” he said. “It hit 3000 North and piled up. So that’s another project.
Yet another such project, Wilson said, involves repairing and improving a bridge in the Right Hand area of Cedar Canyon that was damaged in one of last year’s monsoon storms.
“The bridge on Right Hand was significantly impacted,” Wilson said. “The water topped that bridge by about 8 feet.”
One more project in the works, he said, is the Parowan power plant on Red Creek Road in Paragonah, which also sustained damage last year.
“The Parowan power plant had its doors blown in and they lost equipment due to flooding,” Wilson said.
One smaller project that the county is doing on its own, starting this week, is installing a cross-channel gutter across 800 South at approximately 4700 West.
“That will prevent the water from building up there at the lower end of the Westview subdivision,” Wilson said.
To read Cedar City News’ recent recap of what Cedar City is doing in anticipation of monsoon season, click here.
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