St. George • Driving down River Road, Lonnie Clove can’t help but cast a wary eye on the snow-capped Pine Valley Mountains north of St. George that loom large in his vision and memory.
For him, the weather is not fodder for idle chitchat. It’s been a neverending concern since his frontline role in battling the historic January 2005 flood that sent muddy torrents of water shooting down the Virgin and Santa Clara rivers, overflowing reservoirs, taking out bridges, eroding banks and sending homes tumbling into the watery maelstrom.
“That was 18 years ago but it is still branded in my mind even today,” the St. George resident said about one of the worst natural disasters to ever befall the Washington County area.
All told, the 2005 flood left an unparalleled amount of devastation in its wake, doing more than $200 million in damage — roughly $140 million to infrastructure and another $85 million to private property, according to the Utah Division of Emergency Management spokesperson Wade Mathews.
While a repeat of the 2005 flood seems unlikely, the robust snowpack in the mountains of southern Utah has the full attention of water experts and weather forecasters, who are keeping a close watch on the slopes and skies.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Damage to St. George's Southgate Golf Course and a washed-out bridge after flooding in January 2005.
Snowpack levels in southwest Utah, much like they are in the rest of the state, aren’t at historic levels but are approaching the totals of other great water years over the past several decades. Currently, southwest Utah’s snowpack is about 190% of normal, compared to northern Utah’s 146%. More specifically, the snowpack in the Santa Clara River Basin, a major player in the 2005 flood, stands at 192% of the average, according to Natural Resources Conservation Service officials in Utah.
At this point, southwest Utah’s mountains have 15.5 inches of snow-water equivalent, the amount of water in the snow. That’s well above the 8 inches recorded a year ago at this time. It’s also 2 inches more than the amount tallied in February 2011, which turned out to be a great water year that triggered some minor flooding.
Still, this month’s total falls far short of the 28-inch snowpack recorded on April 1, 2005.
“To see another 2005 we’d have to double our snowpack again between now and the first week of April,” said Troy Brosten, a hydrologist with the NRCS Snow Survey Program.
Even then, a flood the magnitude of the one that swamped the St. George area is not a certainty or even likely. Water experts say a deep snowpack does not, by itself, precipitate a flood.
Glen Merrill, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Salt Lake City, said the risk of flooding is largely determined by significant weather events and how quickly the snowpack melts. The 2005 flood, he explained, was triggered by a deep snowpack and a major storm that deluged southwest Utah with seven inches of rain over a few days.
“If you put rain on snow that isn’t quite as cold as it is up in the mountains …, you actually take the water out of the snowpack and it becomes runoff,” Merrill said. “So not only are you putting seven inches of rain down, but you might be melting five to 10 inches of snow-water equivalent as well.”
In explaining the risk of floods due to run-off, Brosten said the potential for flooding boils down to how quickly the snowpack melts.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Sunbrook Golf Course, with the impact of flooding from the Santa Clara River in January 2005.
“If it stays really cold and then suddenly warms up, it could melt the snowpack very quickly, saturate the ground and go directly into the rivers,” he said. “Then you could see some significant flooding. Ideally, you want the snowpack to melt 1 or 2 inches at a time so it doesn’t come down like a massive flood.”
Brosten said it really is too early in the season to predict the likelihood of flooding this spring runoff season, which typically starts the first of April and runs through June. For his part, Merrill said the forecasts, while not foolproof, don’t seem to favor a repeat.
“We don’t see any of the conditions setting up that might create one of those rain-on-snow events through the end of this month,” said Merrill, adding forecasts for March through May call for above-average temperatures and below-average precipitation.
That’s good news for Clove, who nonetheless still harbors some lingering concerns. In January 2005, the Saturday before the flood, he was sledding with his family in deep snow in the mountains of Pine Valley, about 35 miles north of St. George, when it began to rain.
“I remember telling my wife, ‘That’s not good,’ " he recalled saying.
A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Clove was then bishop of the Green Valley Third Ward, the boundaries of which bordered a 1.5-mile stretch of the Santa Clara River. Monday morning, he learned some ward members’ homes near the Southgate golf course were surrounded by water and sprang into action.
“We spent from 6 in the morning until after 6 that evening putting sandbags on homes all up and down the river where the water was coming up, and I thought we had everything taken care of when I returned home just exhausted.”
Tuning in the noon newscast on KSL-TV at work the following day, Clove watched in disbelief as a helicopter flew over Gunlock Reservoir, where water was cascading in giant sheets over the dam.
“It looked like Niagara Falls,” he said. “I knew I’d better get home.”
Normally placid, the Virgin and Santa Clara rivers were soon raging at 20,000 and 6,500 cubic feet per second, respectively. That night, members of Clove’s congregation joined with neighbors and volunteers from all over the area to remove people’s belongings from 40 homes in imminent danger.
Clove said the water was coming down so hard and fast it began cutting away the river banks, and soon homes began spilling into the turbulent waters and were swept away — about 23 by his count. Other homes were damaged beyond repair.
While massive flooding seems unlikely this year, officials in St. George and Santa Clara say they are much better prepared to deal with a 2005-magnitude event because of the millions of dollars spent on infrastructure improvements over the past 18 years.
For instance, St. George officials say their city has leveraged city funds with state and federal money to replace deteriorating pipes and culverts, dredge and widen the Virgin River and conduct myriad other improvements. Still, they acknowledge, there is always more to do.
“I think we’re okay,” St. George Public Works Director Cameron Cutler said. “We still have our sandbags at the reuse center and our crews that can respond. And at times, when we get some flooding, we have some good contractors who we can call up.”
A civil engineer who does flood-control projects, Santa Clara Mayor Rick Rosenberg estimates his city has spent about $40 million — most of it federal money — since 2005 on a variety of projects, including installing rock armoring on the banks of the Santa Clara River to prevent erosion, removing large trees and vegetation that could impede flows, and building more bridges to give emergency vehicles better access to both sides of the river.
“It’s a different river system in the communities down here now than it was in ‘05,” Rosenberg said. “We’ve done a lot of work since then, so I’m not as worried now with some of the projects we’ve got in place.”
Rosenberg’s confidence is buoyed by the fact that Santa Clara has weathered several major flooding events since 2005 that have not resulted in nearly as much damage or destruction. That said, the mayor still monitors the snowpack and weather conditions closely.
“It doesn’t take much to get me out of bed at night to go look at the river,” he said.
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