On perilous terrain

In late April, Brad Hall was anxiously keeping an eye on his $500,000 home in Mountain Green, Morgan County, monitoring cracking foundations and a bowing back deck and wondering how far the ground supporting his foundation would slide during this year's wet season.

Just down Weber Canyon in South Weber, 4-year-old Kendell Keyes was recovering from a broken leg she suffered after a torrent of mud 80 feet wide swept down the hillside behind her family's home, crashing into the house and throwing the girl against a wall as she watched TV.

Farther south, in South Jordan's river bottoms, Andy and Jeanette Meisenbacher were at work cleaning up their soggy basement and filling their yard with wells and drainage channels to avoid a repeat of the floods that filled their basement and those of two nearby homes in March. The water came from rising groundwater as spring runoff seeped from the western reaches of the valley toward the Jordan River.

This year, the Utah Geological Survey is watching at least 50 landslides from Utah County to Morgan County, many of them near housing developments. The disasters are not just an anomaly due to this year's wet spring. After rain and snowmelt last May, a dramatic landslide in Cedar Hills, Utah County, crashed into some hillside townhouses, forcing four families to move. And in St. George in January 2005, helpless residents watched as homes washed away in the flooded Virgin and Santa Clara rivers.

For homeowners, such disasters are distressing and frustrating. "It was just like they were in a nightmare," said Trudy Keyes, Kendell Keyes' aunt.

As growth brings more and more families to Utah, new housing developments are popping up throughout the state — sometimes in places that once may have seemed off limits. From the homes perched atop Traverse Mountain in Draper's SunCrest neighborhood to east-bench homes straddling the Wasatch Fault, more and more Utahns are building homes in geologically unstable areas.

"A lot of our easily developed land is now developed," said Gary Christenson, geologic-hazards program manager at the Utah Geological Survey. "Our risk is increasing. We are building into riskier areas."

If it all comes tumbling down, fills with water or washes away, who is responsible?

Fair warning?

"They screwed up when they gave everybody permits down here to build basements," Jeanette Meisenbacher told the Deseret Morning News after shallow groundwater breached her South Jordan basement earlier this spring.