WEBER COUNTY, Utah — Weber County road crews are working on clearing debris from the Weber River to help prevent flooding from the runoff.
Crews pulled trees out, cleared logs, and moved material that comes with the fast-flowing water on Tuesday.
"You kind of got to adjust and accommodate what mother nature sends your way,” said Weber County engineer Gary Myers. "This year, believe it or not, is probably actually a fairly average year, maybe slightly above average. Last year was incredible. It was a huge blessing and a curse at the same time."
With last year's record-breaking snowpack came challenges for Weber County road crews.
"One year of really incredible flows moved a ton of material that was a lot of effort to address, and so once we realized how big of an issue it was, the commissioners gave us permission to hire crews specifically to do this work, and that’s what they’ve been doing the past three months now,” added Myers.
The county hired four seasonal workers to help with the clearing process.
This project has been months in the making. It started last year in July, after the spring runoff. "We started working through the permitting process with the state departments as well as the army corps to get permission to actually come in here and do this work,” explained Myers. They also worked with private landowners, and other agencies to strategize best ways to clear all the logs and sediments in the water that can cause problems.
"If the channel is not cleaned out, and there’s not room for that and is choked off with material, log jams, debris, it affects it significantly,” said Myers. “It causes backwater issues and it can ultimately lead to surging out of banks or saturating them and blowing them out."
The water is 18 feet deep now, running at about 1,700 cubic feet per second – think of that as 1,700 basketballs going through every second. This is about half of last year's peak flow. Myers said he isn’t too worried about flooding this year.
"I think we are going to be OK this year. We’ve been watching it pretty closely, talking to the agencies that control the releases out of the reservoirs, and obviously monitoring weather — weather plays a big factor. I’m not overly concerned of property damage or loss at this point,” added Myers.
He says they are almost wrapping up on clearing debris for now. But the work isnt over just yet.
"We got as much as we can. Some of the area is tough to get to because the ground leading up to it is really saturated with rain and snowmelt,” said Myers, “And there’s still always more work to do, and we're going to have to see what flows from this spring added to the work as well too."
