Farmer decries lack of warning

Not knowing why a flood was suddenly inundating his property west of Brigham City, Todd Yates struggled all night Saturday to save his cattle.

"I watched personally at least a half dozen drown," he said in a Deseret Morning News telephone interview Monday, when he finally returned to his home in Brigham City for his first rest in days. Altogether, he may have lost 30 more calves and cows, and the farm suffered heavy additional damage.

Unknown to him, the flood was caused by Utah Power releasing water from Cutler Reservoir, which had been swollen by rains and snowmelt runoff. The reservoir was nearing its maximum capacity as defined by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, according to a Utah Power spokesman.

The water flowed into the Bear River system, causing flooding below the dam.

"Somebody should have told us," Yates said. "Nobody did, nobody cared."

He said he was turned down twice before officials finally let him trench across a road and let the floodwater flow into Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, where it actually was useful.

On Monday, Tammy Kikuchi, spokeswoman for Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., said the governor is sorry about what happened with the releases flooding the farmland. "He just wants to know what happened and what can be done, if anything," she said.

Yates does not live on the property, where he raises crops and cattle. Although he lives in Brigham City, he happened to be on the farm fertilizing fields in preparation for the next crops.

"An unusual amount of water started showing up Saturday morning," he said. He was puzzled because he believed the spring runoff had not yet started.

That afternoon, "more and more water was coming as I was feeding the animals. . . . It started coming faster and faster."

When he called a road office in Brigham City about installing culverts to drain the water into the nearby refuge, he was turned down but not told about the release from Cutler Reservoir, Yates said.

"Later in the evening I started to expect that maybe Cutler Dam had broke," Yates said. "Nobody made any effort to contact us."

Clark N. Davis, a Box Elder County commissioner, confirmed that deputy Lynn Yeates warned residents but not farmers, who don't live in that vicinity.

"We were worried about bodily injury," not harm to farmland, Davis said. He added that at the time the road was believed to belong to the federal refuge, but the route turned out later to be the county's.

Yates said he telephoned deputy Yeates and asked what was going on. "I was still not told there was a release of any substantial amount of water from Cutler Dam," he said.

"They did not tell me why the water was coming or where it was coming from."