LAYTON — It was a grim-faced bunch Friday in the board room of the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District, where the numbers passed out on a sheet of paper were staggering.

Snowpack for the Ogden/Weber drainage, on average, is 374 percent of normal as of May 26.

That average is drawn from an overwhelmingly gnarly group of individual snowpack statistics: 607 percent of average for Parleys Summit, Chalk Creek, 947 percent of average, or say the Smith-Morehouse at 1,286 percent of average.

"We know we are going to get hurt," said Wayne Gibson, a fourth-generation dairy farmer from West Weber who sits on the district's board of trustees. "When all else fails, you get on your knees and pray and get up and go to work in the morning. That is what we have been doing all spring."

The western edges of lower Weber County have already been overtaken by the swollen Weber River before it dumps into the Great Salt Lake. Wayne Gibson's son, Weber County Commissioner Kerry Gibson, said Friday he could see 200 acres of his farmland under water.

"The cows are looking for high ground," he said.

Related:

Flood Watch River Flow Tracker

Follow the flood potential and flood stage levels across Utah with KSL's exclusive river flow tracker.

In the upper Ogden Valley, before the Ogden River flows into Pineview and meets up with the Weber River, campgrounds and summer homes have fallen victim to flood waters.

Tage Flint, the district's general manager, said flooding was brought on by relentless rain and is in the shadow of the unprecedented snowpack that still needs to come down.

Reservoirs like Pineview and Echo/Rockport were dropped to the lowest levels on historical record in mid-May, Flint said, but the rain has brought them back up. As a result, the district is fast running out of options when it comes to being able to control what is released downstream.

"There is a possibility in some of these facilities, with a snowpack so abnormally large this year, we may spill these reservoirs earlier than we would like to," Flint said. "In that case, we lose opportunities to control it much. We will do everything we can to avoid it, but it it still a possibility because this is well beyond what the (reservoir) designers thought we could do for flood control."

Flint said the district can try to orchestrate the releases from the reservoirs to make room for the runoff — being extremely mindful of downstream impacts on one hand, and being careful to maintain long-term summer storage on the other hand.

"It will be hour by hour decisions when the runoff really starts raging regarding how much we release and how much we retain," Flint said.

But, he stressed, managing that much water is nearly an unmanageable task in many ways.

Causey Reservoir, which is already over its spillway, holds 7,850 acre feet of water. If it were bone dry, the district could fill it in one day, district officials said.

Where it can, the district is working on contingency plans that hinge on the cooperation of other water managers such as the Central Utah Water Conservancy District and the Provo River Water Users Association.

Last June, an overflowing Weber River at Oakley in Summit County caused damage to subdivisions, summer cabins and farmland.

Water managers expect this year's situation to be worse, but are hoping enough of the river's flows can be sent through the Weber-Provo Canal to eventually be dumped into Jordanelle, which has ample space to take the flood water.

While there are some complications related to water right issues, Jordanelle's levels have been deliberately dropped to make room for the burgeoning Weber River runoff.

Email:aodonoghue@ksl.com

Related topics