Utah's wet weather woes: Mudslide destroys historic barn

SOUTH WEBER — There are parts of the past Nolan Birt is content to have buried — like memories of stacking hay and milking cows in the early morning.

But as he surveyed the splinters of his grandfather's barn on Monday, it was hard not to become sentimental.

"It's sad," he said, watching as sons-in-law and neighbors rescued old saddles and boxes from the ruins of the barn.

"We're not positive how far it goes back, at least three generations."

As a child, Birt and his three brothers played and worked in the old barn. Over the years, it became a landmark — one of a few remaining barns in this rural Davis County community between Ogden and Layton.

On Sunday, the Birt family barn was gone.

A chunk of the hill above came sliding down around 6 p.m. and ripped through all but a corner of the building.

Trees were uprooted, building beams snapped, the metal roof came sliding across South Weber Road. With the destruction went equipment for a landscaping business, bales of hay, tools and memories.

Nothing more substantial was lost.

"There wasn't any loss of life, animals or people, and I guess that's what it comes down to," Birt said.

But he's bracing for more of the hillside to come crashing down. Wet weather is expected today, and the land east of Sunday's slide is unstable, said Gary Christenson with the Utah Geological Survey.

Christenson was surveying the land above the Birt barn Monday with fellow geologist Rich Giraud, a senior geologist with the Utah Geological Survey.

It wasn't surprising that a landslide happened because the area is known for weak clay soils that are prone to slides, he said.

Also, 20 feet above the start of the slide area is the Davis and Weber Canal. In 1999, a portion of that canal burst, sending mud sliding through 75 homes in the Riverdale area.

"This is a landslide where geologically landslides have occurred frequently over the past 10,000 years," said Christenson. "It looks like here there's a clay layer where water just pooled on top."

While Weber and northern Davis counties have been wetter than normal this year — the wettest since 1997 — Christenson and Giraud aren't predicting any more slides in the near future.

"If our climate stays where we're at, if it dries up and we don't see rainfall, there won't be a lot of problems," said Giraud.