Owner of flooded yard is blaming Ivory

DRAPER — This week's wet weather has converted parts of Draper's steep foothills into muddy rivers and one man's yard into a lake.

Brad Fellows, who spent the week sandbagging and pumping water from his drowned back yard, blames the soggy transformation of his Draper home on new developments inching higher and higher up the city's foothills. Ivory Homes, which is working on its property above Fellows' home, denies that anything it has done has created the flooding problems.

Ivory attorney Benson Hathaway said the flooding is no fault of the developer. The Fellows home, he said, was built in a drainage easement intended to collect water coming from the Bear Canyon Creek above the Ivory subdivision.

The builder of the Fellows home, Hathaway said, failed to meet certain storm drainage and water line provisions required by the city. Fellows, however, sees a relationship between the problems at his home, 12117 S. 1950 East, and the Ivory subdivision, which went in about 13 months ago.

"They've stripped all the vegetation and kind of graded the land so it filters all the water into our property," Fellows said. He has filed a suit against the developer.

He said development began at the same time his property began experiencing flooding. The recent rains have brought the highest water levels yet as temporary retention basins overflowed and dikes burst under the pressure.

"Today it came so fast we couldn't even get the sandbags up in time," Fellows said Thursday. "It's just incredible what they've done; they've made no provisions at all for the runoff of water."

But local officials also say a wetter-than-usual weather pattern is creating problems in several areas in the south end of Salt Lake County, particularly in other hillside subdivisions in the city's Corner Canyon area, where water is pooling in neighborhoods and gushing down city streets, city manager Eric Keck said.

Several developments that have excavated and ripped out vegetation have only compounded the problem, he said.

"It's just saturation. We've had so much rain this week that it has exacerbated that situation," Keck said. "Water now is just hanging around and not percolating into the earth. In previous years when the ground's been dry, it would run off quickly." The wet spring is a contrast to several years of drought in northern Utah.