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HERRIMAN -- Flooding is one of the predictable aftereffects of wildfires, and Herriman City wants to be ready.
City officials have 4,700 sandbags at the ready and another 10,000 sandbags in a Salt Lake County stockpile in Midvale in case rain presents a threat in the areas burned in the massive fire that started Sunday at Camp Williams.
The funding we have available can't be used on federal land, but we expect the same contractors will be used. To the observer, it will all be one coordinated project.
–Gordon Haight
By Monday or Tuesday, city and county officials expect to have contracts in place to begin reseeding parts of the burned area and installing silt fences and debris basins. The initial work is being paid for using $400,000 in federal Emergency Watershed Protection funding that is administered by the state.
The flooding threat following the Machine Gun fire is significant enough that the National Weather Service has already contacted local officials directly. The warning came when a weather system threatened to drop a quarter of an inch of rain within 15 minutes on Wednesday.
Related:
National Guard begins reimbursing Herriman residents for fire damage
The National Guard is beginning to make good on its promise to reimburse Herriman residents for damages caused by a wildfire earlier this week. The Guard has opened a claim center where it is reimbursing people on site."That is extremely high-intensity rain and would have caused flooding even without the fire," Herriman City engineer Gordon Haight said. Haight said the actual rainfall was much less and did not cause problems.
Rehabilitation work is being handled separately on Camp Williams land, but the work to rehabilitate all of the burned area is being coordinated among the different levels of government.
"The funding we have available can't be used on federal land," Haight said, "but we expect the same contractors will be used. To the observer, it will all be one coordinated project."
The money can be used to rehabilitate private property, so officials will begin contacting property owners Monday to get consent to work on their land. "We've talked to some and it's all been very positive to this point," Haight said.
The federal grant money has to be spent by the end of the current fiscal year, which ends in October, so the work has to be done quickly. That's not a problem, Haight said, both because flooding is an immediate threat and because fall is an ideal season for planting.
A similar threat played out in Draper in 2009 when rainfall caused flooding in an area above Corner Canyon.
"We had a rainstorm on that hillside and the debris flow ended up getting into some homes," said Scott Baird, Salt Lake County's engineering and flood control director. Some of the terrain is similar to that in the burned area in Herriman, said Baird, who is part of the intergovernmental team working on rehabilitation efforts in the Herriman area.
E-mail: sfidel@ksl.com
