By Monday, only 45 or 50 acres of his 750-acre farm remain out of water. The rest is under 2 or 3 feet. Meanwhile, he said, he has to pay a mortgage on the farm of $2,000 a month.

Davis said if there was any notification requirement "it should have come from Utah Power and Light."

On Sunday, Utah Power spokesman Jeff Hymas told this newspaper that the National Weather Service issued a flood warning for the area below the reservoir and that the utility was in contact with the Box Elder County Sheriff's Department and others about the releases.

"The resources of a municipality or a county are spread awfully thin, and you establish your priority, and your number-one priority is human life," Davis said. "There's a reason why these lands are called wetlands."

Deputy Yeates said the important issue is that when the water release happened, it affected land from the dam to the bird refuge close to the Great Salt Lake, about 25 miles away.

"There's no feasible way to notify every landowner on the total 25-mile length," said Yeates, who is also the Box Elder County director of emergency services.

Two main releases took place, he said, about 3 a.m. Friday and 11 a.m. Saturday. He estimates the crest took eight to 12 hours to reach Yates' property.

Emergency crews immediately made contact with people close to the dam because the release "raised the Bear River two feet," he said.

"We immediately notified the people that we knew of who had homes and structures immediately downstream," but there was no feasible way to tell everyone along the river, he said.

Asked why he did not tell Yates what was going on when they talked, Yeates replied that he referred him to the county road people on the question of cutting the road. Meanwhile, he said, he was probably too busy trying to notify people whose homes were immediately below Cutler Reservoir to talk about the releases then.

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com