Family pleads for fix as officials confirm 200 homes impacted by Sugar House flooding


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SUGAR HOUSE — A family severely impacted by thunderstorm-spawned flooding made their case to city leaders Friday that relief and a fix were needed.

Matt and Erin Davis, who live along 1900 East just south of where Wilmington Ave. intersects the street, said much of the water from their neighborhood essentially bottlenecked at the storm drain and flooded their house.

The couple said the water and mud from the July 26 flood broke their windows and pooled four-and-a-half feet deep in their basement, wiping out a finished area that included an art studio for Erin Davis.

“We calculated based on the standing water that it was 17,000 gallons,” Matt Davis told city officials and Councilwoman Lisa Adams during a tour. “It’s probably about every 3 years that it’s someone along here that gets it into the house.”

The couple said other problems along the street in previous years are evidence of a flawed street design.

“We were the storm drain, in my opinion,” Erin Davis said. “Wilmington comes down and hits our street at a ‘T.’ We only have one storm drain at that ‘T,’ so it’s too much.”

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Adams said city leaders were assessing challenges in the area following the flooding, and she would be going door-to-door with other neighbors on Wednesday.

“This particular street has been identified as a place that needs engineering work,” Adams said.

She encouraged neighbors who didn’t have significant enough damage to file a claim to report it to the city anyway, so engineers could develop a heat map of trouble spots.

Roughly 200 homeowners had reported at least some damage to the city, officials confirmed.

The Davis family said they hoped the city would offer relief and, hopefully, a long-term solution to potential flooding in the area.

“The problem needs to be fixed on a lot of different levels,” Erin Davis said. Andrew Adams is a multi-media journalist for KSL NewsRadio and KSL-TV. His work also regularly appears in the Deseret News. Email: aadams@ksl.com

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