MOAB, Utah — After multiple bad storms in recent weeks flooded yards and homes in Moab, residents are begging for help and claim the city is at fault.
“It leaves you in this kind of helpless feeling of, what do we do?,” asked resident Heather Taylor.
The homes in Moab's 100-year Floodplain have been hit twice with floods within the last two years.
“The whole valley drains right through our backyard to the Colorado River, and so unless they can actually get in and make that creek capable of packing the water, we're kind of stuck in this scenario over and over,” Taylor added.
For more than a century, Taylor’s family has been on the same piece of land near downtown.
“When my husband and I decided to build a home here, it's because we are rooted here," she explained. "This is where both of us were raised. Both of us grew up and we knew we wanted to raise our family here.”
In August 2022, for the first time ever, Mill Creek flooded the Taylor’s property.
“Mud and debris covered the whole yard around me here; logs, cut logs, just other people's trash from upstream, mostly, and complete devastation,” Taylor described.
Taylor believes city management is to blame for the mess.
“We feel like this is happening because they put bridges in the creek bed where they don't belong, and and so now those got plugged up," she said. "They didn't get removed after they were plugged up. It took a long time to even get them, to clean them and kind of left them behind for it to happen again.”
The abutments are still in the creek after the city took out the bridge, but Moab Mayor Joette Langianese claims removing bridges won't stop flooding.
“We don't believe that those bridges have any impact on the flooding on [the Taylor's] property," the mayor said. "We removed the bridges just for safety mechanisms, because they did catch a lot of debris, so we removed them and the same situation happened without the bridges.”
Langianese says the city is developing a long-term flood mitigation plan that could include reinforcing the creek bed to stop erosion.
“We used to love big thunderstorms in Moab," said Langianese. "When it would rain, we'd go out and we'd sit and we'd watch the rain and the lightning and the smell on the red rocks. Now we're terrified because we haven't seen anything like this before.”
The mayor hopes state lawmakers will prioritize helping the city as new bridges will cost tens of millions of dollars.
“I think we need to push that out a little bit more so that they understand how important it is, and that we are a small town and an island in the desert," she said. "We don't have a lot of resources down here.”
Pushing the mud that washes into her back yard with each flood into a wall, Taylor says she can only do so much to keep her family safe.
“When I think, my kids don't come home and feel safe here because we're worrying the next time we're going to get hit, that for me, at the end of the day, I have to do whatever I can to protect my kids.”
