The creek fell below flood stage as the weekend closed, but when I walked the 63 steps from my backyard to the bank of Emigration that meets our property line, you could have fooled me. It was hardly that sweetly gurgling stream I hear on warm summer mornings, but a roiling river so thick with silt it was running the color of melted milk chocolate.
Tree branches bobbed in the current, some snagging on the muddy banks but many more moving 200 yards downstream to be trapped by a concrete and rebar-grated contraption built 23 years ago, just after the Great Spring Floods of '83.
Spring is struggling for a toehold in northern Utah, but as evidenced by a steady combo of rain and snow, winter isn't ready to pack up. "It's looking a lot like '83 out there," my husband said after trimming overgrown shrubs during a break in the stormy weather Saturday.
On Monday, the snow blew horizontally. My long-stemmed tulips, so open to the warm breeze the day before, bowed under the weight of heavy slush. My husband said it again: "It's a lot like '83."
He was Salt Lake City's mayor in 1983, and I don't believe he's taken Utah's annual spring thaw for granted since. Sure, he's gotten a bit used to a succession of droughts these past several years. Mild winters turn to scorching summers practically overnight.
We don't act like water-logged people anymore. Lawns have been parched for nearly a decade of summers; people have taken to xeriscaping their lots with a vengeance.
The weather cycle of May 1983 was much like this one. Spring was marked by intermittent sunshine with rain falling on snow. The mountains were packed with more than 600 inches of snow. Sudden heat in late May changed everything.
Silt clogged City, Red Butte, Emigration and Parleys creeks. The city's infrastructure - storm drains, retention basins - couldn't keep pace. City Creek jumped the banks at Memory Grove.
The former mayor still smiles when he recalls telephoning every spiritual leader he could think of on a Sunday morning, desperately trying to assemble a volunteer force of sandbaggers downtown.
Mormons, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, non-believers - all showed up in a matter of hours. Funny, no one worried for a second about any "great religious divide" in the city.
They lined up along 1300 South, 800 South, North Temple. He remembers a "festive atmosphere" as people straight from church services loosened neckties, rolled shirt sleeves, hitched up skirts and started filling and passing sandbags.
"There were 5,000 people out there, feeling the community," he remembers. "It was the equivalent of building an Egyptian pyramid in one day."
The following year, $5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and a $22 million bond helped pay for huge improvements in flood control. The banks of City Creek were heavily reinforced with steel mesh and gravel; crews built two retention basins at Memory Grove and Little Dell reservoir, between Emigration and Parleys canyons.
LeRoy Hooton, the Salt Lake City public utilities director who worked the '83 floods, says workers have been releasing water from Little Dell regularly since Feb. 15, clearing grates throughout the city and "trying to keep it all in balance."
But it's wet and cold, and true spring is holding back like a stubborn child who won't do as instructed. "We're doing everything we can as human beings, but at some point," Hooton reminds, "Mother Nature takes over."
hmullen@sltrib.com, 801-257-8610
