Southern Utah Braces for Snowpack Melt

CEDAR CITY, Utah — This scenic high-desert town is preparing with grim determination for the melting of a monster snowpack in the mountains above, which could release a spectacular flood.

Crews are raising the bed of a state highway and fortifying ditches, the city engineer is praying for gradual warming that would release water slowly over time, and elected officials are preemptively declaring a state of emergency they may not need for a month.

The decree allows two counties to call on the Army Corps of Engineers on a moment’s notice for heavy equipment if flooding strikes southern Utah, which has snowpacks of as much as 372% of normal at some high-mountain locations.

“That snowpack -- it’s scary,” said Jim Allan, city manager of Midway Valley, a 9,800-foot mountain saddle near the snowed-in Cedar Breaks National Monument that looms over this town. Hay and alfalfa fields give way to low-lying housing tracts across the basin floor.

Throughout the West, an uneven winter left few places with more wet, heavy snow than southern Utah. The Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies were uncharacteristically dry; Stampede Pass in Washington state, which normally builds a snowpack holding 50 inches of water, never broke 10 inches all winter, said Randy Julander, Utah’s federal snow survey supervisor.

“We got Washington’s snowpack, is what it boils down to,” he said.

The high sprawling plateau above Cedar City is a concern not only for its deep snowpack -- still nearly 13 feet, enough to bury cabins to the roof -- but the snow’s high water content.

“Think of it as a pool of water on the mountain 67 inches deep,” said Brian McInerney, National Weather Service hydrologist.

That figure has since climbed beyond 70 inches, more than triple that of a normal winter.

Pacific storms favored the drought-weary Southwest this winter, leaving Arizona and New Mexico their wettest in a century. But even as the flood threat diminishes with warming and gradual melting in Arizona and New Mexico, and Nevada prepares to absorb its runoff in depleted reservoirs, Utah appears to be in the grip of a cool, wet spring.

If that trend continues for a month, then breaks into summer temperatures, the canyons of southern Utah could be in for trouble, especially if heavy rains arrive anytime over the next two months of snowmelt, McInerney said.

A freak January rainstorm swept away two dozen homes along the Santa Clara River, now being armored by rock for the next round. The Santa Clara joins the Virgin River just above St. George, a booming retirement community along the meandering Virgin, which crews are trying to channel.

Other communities are at risk. Springdale, just outside Zion National Park, sits almost entirely on the Virgin’s historic floodplain and has little hope of surviving a deluge. Downstream, Mesquite, Nev., used dynamite in a failed attempt to coax the Virgin back into an old channel and away from eroded banks that in January forced dozens to leave their homes.

“Everything on the Virgin River is ready to rip and run,” Julander said.

At the higher elevation of Cedar City, many newcomers seem unaware of the danger lurking in a mountain snowpack 18 miles away.

Tom Cullen, a retired telecom worker from Massachusetts, joked about acquiring lakefront property with water rising from a dry lake bed a few hundred yards from his new ranch house.

“I’m concerned about the water, but worried? I don’t think it’s going to get this high,” said Cullen, who moved here with his wife a year ago on 20 acres he bought for $40,000.

Yet city officials are spooked by a snowpack 40% larger than any other in more than a half-century of record-keeping.

For two months, the city has been preparing with military determination, fortifying Coal Creek and ditches all around town, clearing out creek beds and shoveling sandbags. The state is raising more than a half-mile of state Route 56, which flooded last October.

Coal Creek, which cuts through town, is flowing at little more than 50 cubic feet per second in cool temperatures. It’s expected to carry 2,000 cubic feet per second or more at the height of runoff.

Cedar City is spending $60,000 enlarging one ditch around a new housing development eight miles to Lake Quichapa, a normally dry, clay-baked saucer on the basin floor that has no outlet and can lose water only to evaporation.

“We’re making a concentrated effort of trying to get our channels cleared out for the spring runoff,” said Kit Wareham, city engineer.