Aging canals and growing cities are hazardous mix

There are more than 5,000 miles of canals — many of them built with the sweat of pioneer ingenuity and the help of federal dollars — that snake along the hillsides and cross the pastures of Utah.

Built to deliver water to thirsty fruit orchards and sustain rural communities, the canals form an elaborate labyrinth of waterways that turned the valleys of the nation's second most arid state into lush farmland.

For the most part, they have co-existed peacefully with Utahns as the state has grown up, tucked away out of sight, quietly doing what they were built to do each growing season.

But age catches up, and blending growing cities with aging canals can lead to disasters like the July 11 breach of the Cache County canal that killed a mother and her two children.

"The canals were built in a rural area, away from towns, and if there was a failure, it wasn't as catastrophic as it could be today," said Jamison Thornton, general manager of Strawberry High Line Canal Co. in Payson. "With urban development, the houses were built in areas below canals … it's just a dangerous situation anyway you look at it."

And with tragedy so often comes blame.

Canal operators complain they can't control what development goes in around them, yet they're left with the liability.

Cities approve development projects that may be inappropriately placed but also complain that because of the state's fierce defense of private property rights, there is little they can do to restrict what someone does with their own land.

"There are just some places that houses should not be built," Thornton said, whose own company is fighting a developer who wants to take out a chunk of the mountainside on which the canal sits, put in a 40-foot retaining wall as reinforcement and build houses below.

"We've even looked at purchasing the property ourselves to prevent it from happening from a liability standpoint."

Lincoln Shurtz, director of legislative affairs with the Utah League of Cities and Towns, said cities have become better at requiring geologic mapping and engineering studies to expose potential risks. But case law and state law leave a city's ability to resist development very limited, Shurtz said, and it isn't possible to go back and "unbuild" the homes put in decades ago. And so, over the years, canals and homeowners have become wary neighbors, trying to meld in an environment at odds with itself.

A century removed