Chiefs from '83 remember Salt Lake floods and their impacts on conditions now

SALT LAKE CITY — Massive thunderstorms in the fall of 1982 gave Terry Holzworth a lot to think about.

A wet September means trouble when spring comes, the Salt Lake County public works director was thinking. "We started our assessment, finding out where all of the weak points were" with storm drains, water retention basins, canals — everything that held or carried water.

Leroy W. Hooton Jr., Salt Lake City's public works director at the time, was having the same concerns. Spotty reports of flooded basements meant soils were saturated.

But what happened in 1983 when April rolled into May was worse than either anticipated.

A massive landslide in southern Utah County blocked the Spanish Fork River, burying railroad lines and literally drowning the small town of Thistle in 180 feet of water. The Utah Geological Survey estimated the direct damage at $200 million.

Farther north, the snowpack was holding — even building in some places — clear into May. But then temperatures surged suddenly, and temperatures were in the 90s as Memorial Day approached.

That weekend, mountain runoff hit debris choking the underground passages that carry City Creek through downtown Salt Lake City and pushed the creek over its banks and down State Street, which literally became a river for several weeks.

Then-Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson called on volunteers, who turned out by the thousands to help line State Street with sandbags to protect buildings on either side.

"The Public Works Department built bridges over the river so that traffic, commerce downtown was not affected and people could pass over the river."

A similar approach had already been taken on 1300 South, where the underground confluence of three mountain streams could no longer contain the sudden runoff.

A mindset that stream and canal banks were dumping grounds for yard waste compounded the problem of keeping mountain stream water moving toward the Jordan River.

"Our problems were primarily caused by the streams getting plugged up with all the stuff — the trees, grass clippings, everything everybody laid on the bank," Holzworth said. "Unfortunately it doesn't go very far downstream before it becomes the neighbor's plug and floods him."

Flooding was such big news that Holzworth spent a lot of time doing media interviews and was nicknamed the "Flood Czar."