Initiative aims to boost safety of Utah's canals

A safety initiative designed to identify "high hazard" areas along Utah's more than 6,000 miles of canals was unveiled Thursday.

The will and much of the data are there in support of the initiative, but finding money to fund a management plan will probably be as tough as identifying who's responsible for disastrous canal breaches.

Members of the State Water Development Commission were briefed on the initiative at their meeting, a plan that calls for mapping vulnerable areas using both data on file with the state and on-the-ground inspections.

Sterling Brown of the Utah Farm Bureau has been part of a group studying canal safety at the behest of Gov. Gary Herbert after a July 11 canal failure in Logan.

A wave of mud and debris killed Jackeline Leavy and her two children, Victor Alanis and Abbey Alanis, and damaged several other homes in the neighborhood.

In the months afterward, farmers who relied on the canal to irrigate their crops struggled to get water to their fields, highlighting the conflict that comes when subdivisions replace farmlands and development gets the nod of city officials.

Commission member Dallin Jensen noted that as difficult and time consuming as it has been for the state to tackle dam safety issues, those challenges pale compared to ensuring the safety of canals.

"Dams are confined — you know where they are. The canal thing is much more difficult, particularly in these urban areas where cities have approved subdivisions and backyards go right up to the canal, approaching the easements."

The initiative, which brings together the at-times contradictory interests of city officials, canal company owners and farmers, will be formally presented Tuesday at the meeting of the state's Executive Water Task Force.

It calls for taking the "staggering" amount of information already filed with the state Division of Water Resources on canals and the resources of the water conservation districts and others to "profile" trouble zones where failures can occur.

Red flags, Brown said, would be neighboring populations, soil makeup, the slope of the ground, infrastructure and other factors.

With that data mapped, people then will hit the ground and physically walk the canals, conducting an eyes-on survey to either bolster suspicions or allay them.

"It's a matter of going out with these maps, walking the high-risk portions of the canals, looking for trees, for gopher holes, and then coming up with a risk management plan," Brown said.

Those plans would then be put on file with the state, the canal companies and the conservation districts and allow the aggressive pursuit of federal loans or grants to fix the problems.

Brown said a preliminary estimate of the state's financial commitment would be $200,000 over the next two or three years, a chunk of change he knows will not be easily obtained given the state's fiscal crunch.

The discussion happened after Sen. Gene Davis, D-Salt Lake, said Thursday he intends to run legislation that deals with canal safety after the fatal canal slide in Cache County.

Brown then told Davis and other commission members of the initiative, which he said could put in place a plan to avert another tragedy, without pointing fingers.

e-mail: amyjoi@desnews.com