LOGAN, Utah — When asked how it was going, as his trailer is surrounded by water, Justin Mclean laughed and said: "How's it going? It's going."
Despite flood mitigation efforts by Logan City and its residents, the Blacksmith Fork River is flooding, and a nearby trailer park community is bearing the impacts.
Mclean and his neighbors have been trudging through water and sandbagging for hours over the last couple days, but Kat Zaloshinsky says it wasn't enough.
"We spent 12 hours the other day putting sandbags down," she said, "But of course, mother nature is very powerful, and it didn't do very much good. [The water] came up anyway, but at least we tried."
The flooding has now caused Mclean, Zaloshinsky, Lucia Rodriguez and the rest of the park's residents to be without power, water and sewer.
"I have a diabetic son that needs insulin refrigerated, I have my wife's medication — she has MS — and it needs to be refrigerated too, and that's money I don't have and goes to waste," Mclean said.
"We don't have power. The food is bad already," Rodriguez said.
Logan City Fire Chief Brad Hannig says until the water recedes, the utilities cannot be turned back on.
"It will damage the systems and could potentially harm, injure or kill someone," Chief Hannig said.
Hannig says flood waters submerged a transformer, forcing the city's hand to turn off services.
"There's been a couple of areas where there is no way to mitigate or overt water, and one of those was the trailer park," he said.
Hannig says the city has been working for months to prepare residents to vacate at a moment's notice, but many say they don't have anywhere else to go.
"There's no place to go, they're all full, everybody else around here is full. We can boondock, but then we're still without power, without water, without showers," Mclean said.
For Mclean and others, the flood hardships are starting to compound on top of everything else.
"My wife lost her grandpa just two weeks ago, and now all this. I don't have power, my son almost went into diabetic ketoacidosis because his stress level gets too high [and] it messes up his sugars, so everything is just piling up, piling up, and piling up. I can't do it anymore," Mclean said.
The Red Cross says they have been in contact with Logan City and are ready to mobilize if needed but have not been requested on the ground in the Blacksmith Fork area yet.
