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SALT LAKE CITY — An all-hands-on-deck operation started up City Creek Canyon northeast of the Capitol Wednesday as Salt Lake City Public Utility crews pulled debris from the river.
"Everybody is in City Creek removing debris," Patrick Nelson, from the public utilities department, said.
He said many of the employees work other jobs but they were needed to help clean the debris out of the river before the expected record runoff causes the water to rise.
KSL found a variety of crews stationed along the riverbanks. Many of them not only cleared out debris from the banks of the river but also got into the river with their waders on to pull out logs, trees and branches.
The goal was to try and do everything they could to make a clearer path for water to flow.
"It could really help out a whole lot," Mike Gunn said. He's been with the department for nearly 20 years. "We've got a long ways to go. This is a slow process."
Right now crews said City Creek is looking pretty good. Mother Nature is heating up and cooling off exactly the way water managers want it. Snow on the lower part of the mountains has melted, but it's the record snowfall that still sits up above that worries everybody. "We cannot control Mother Nature. We cannot control the weather patterns, but we can optimize some success after '83 and '84. They put in some pretty large debris basins. They resized a lot of storm drain pipes and we are just taking those lessons learned and putting them to good use," Nelson said.
Last week, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and other city leaders discussed where the city is now compared to those floods in the '80s.
They said while it is easy to spot similarities looking back from 1983 to now when it comes to all the extra water, we have come leaps and bounds from where we were.
Mendenhall said the city is more prepared now in processes, planning and infrastructure compared to 1983. Some infrastructure to help the city includes debris basins designed to catch sticks and other debris that comes down in runoff.
