The Floods of ’83
40 years ago, on Memorial Day weekend, temperatures rose suddenly up to 90 degrees. It had been a very wet, cool spring and large amounts of snow had acclimated in the nearby mountains above Salt Lake City. The sudden warmth released a cascade of snow melt and all the normally placid creeks and rivers that fed into the city were overwhelmed. The flow in City Creek, near the upper part of the city, increased 6-fold, becoming a raging torrent. The only thing that could be done was to redirect the massive flow into and down State Street, one of the major arteries that led directly up to the state capital. That Memorial Day Sunday, a call went out to all the major religious groups and other organizations to gather along State Street and fill sandbags to keep the water out of homes and businesses. It worked, but Salt Lake City was divided in two while the impromptu river flowed freely down that main thoroughfare.
My wife, Lynne, who was 5 months pregnant with our son, Rob, worked right on the upper part of State Street at the Hansen Planetarium as the assistant director. She had to park in a mall parking lot across the street and walked over a makeshift temporary wooden bridge for pedestrian traffic to get to her job, now on the bank of a river. This continued for nearly three weeks and then for another period of cleanup and reconstruction. Other cities were also impacted all along the range of the Wasatch Mountains where most of the population of the state resides. Considerable damage occurred on streets, bridges, waterways and housing all along the mountains as the water rushed into the valley.
The level of the Great Salt Lake rose more then 5 feet that year, a record since measurements had been kept. The lake continued to rise in the mid-1980s, threatening the Lucin Cutoff railroad fill, Interstate highways, mineral recovery industries and sewage-treatment plants along the lake. Huge pumps were built to pull some of the lake’s excess waters into the Great Salt Lake Desert to the west. Completed in less than a year, at a cost of nearly $60 million, the pumps began operation in April, 1987. At that time, a drought began, causing the lake level to naturally fall. The pumps were mothballed in 1989 and haven’t been used since. In southern Utah, Lake Powell filled to capacity and in July, 1983, the spillway of the dam was activated. The heavy flow caused cavitation in the tunnel and the spillway began to fail. Emergency measures narrowly averted a total failure of the dam. In the 40 years since, the reservoir has fallen to historical low levels and is now at 33% of capacity.
The record snowfall in the mountains of Utah have behaved this year with gradual melting and normal temperatures. After the floods of 1983, considerable work was done to mitigate any future events with new reservoirs and larger capacity culverts and river channels feeding into populated areas. Minor flooding has occurred this year in some areas, but nothing close to the ’83 floods. The record precipitation this year has temporarily put an end to severe drought here in Utah and saved the Great Salt Lake and Lake Powell from drying out completely. It remains to be seen if drought conditions will return, but, as for now, we have received a year and a half of grace from whatever the future holds for us.
(Pedestrians cross the State Street river in 1983 on wooden bridges mere inches above the water, image courtesy the Salt Lake Tribune).
