City of Moab is preparing for the ‘next big flood’

The City of Moab is preparing for its next big flood amid extreme weather conditions the nation has seen the past month — and what Moab has seen the last few years.

City Manager Michael Black told The Times-Independent the city’s biggest concerns are the issues they’ve seen in the last few years.

“We tried to pinpoint areas where we know we’ve had issues before,” Black said in an interview. “[We are] trying to learn from past floods and address those areas.”

The major areas of focus have been cleaning the drain channels, the detention basins, monitoring the creeks and creating stations for residents to take sand bags.

Ongoing projects

Moab has a total of eight detention basins, which were built after World War I by the Civilian Conservation Corps. These are little dams that create detention basins, where water drains out along with sediment.

“Over time, [it] actually doesn’t take much time at all for sediment to fill these things up,” Black said.

Public Works Director Levi Jones has cleared out seven of the eight detention basins so far.

Jones’ team is working on gaining access to the last basin and City Engineer Mark Jolissaint noted that there’s “dozens if not hundreds” of basins that the city has lost track of because they were “mostly built by the Civilian Conservation Corps.”

Another project the city has done is adding riprap, also known as stone, underneath bridges on 400 East and Pack Creek, 400 East on Mill Creek, 500 West on Mill Creek and Pack Creek. They are also in the designing process to build a new bridge for 300 South.

“I think the whole community understands that the bridge is at a choke point,” Black said.

About 30% of the hydraulic modeling is done as well as 30% of the design. Black noted they are also working with state and federal lobbyists to secure funding for the bridge, which is expected to cost between $10 and $12 million.

Utah Sen. John Curtis requested funding but Black has yet to hear back if they’ll receive help from the federal level. If the funding isn’t approved then Black said there’s contingency plans in place to build the bridge.

“Our contingency would be to look at the resources from the state, other grants, different kinds of routes than what we did with Senator Curtis,” Black said. “And then using local resources to make these improvements.”

Local resources could be the sales and property taxes, which comes from the city’s general fund. Black noted that property tax revenue already goes to capital improvements and that’s where the money would most likely come from.

Despite the contingency plan, Black is hopeful they will receive federal funding for the bridge. However, it’s unsure if there even is funding available with the Trump Administration moving forward with the Big Beautiful Bill.

“All of the back end dollars and cents are still being figured out,” Black said. “It’s buried somewhere in there, if it’s in there at all.”

Federal assistance

Despite the optimism, NOTUS, a nonpartisan news organization, reported that President Donald Trump has systemically defunded natural disaster prevention resources.

Last October, the Grand County Commission approved allocating funds to the city from the Flood Mitigation Assistance Grant that they applied for in August 2022 after a major flooding event.

Four months later, the Trump Administration took down the grant, which was supposed to allocate $600 million this year to reduce long-term flood risks.

Mayor Joette Langianese highlighted the flood in Texas and said if a flood like that happened in Moab, then “no work that we’ve done is going to be able to stop what happened down there … but it just shows you that things are changing and those kinds of events could happen here.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also posted a budget proposal on June 30 which would close down four key weather labs in Boulder, Colorado. These labs help predict extreme weather events, including Moab’s weather patterns.

City spokesperson Lisa Church told The Times-Independent that what happens at the federal level is out of their hands.

“At this point we’re going to keep planning and figuring out how we can best protect the city,” Church said.

About 90% of the nation’s disasters involve flooding and these types of catastrophic events have increased globally.

The event in Texas confirms to Black that extreme weather is a real thing and that it will happen. He cited it’s the standard in Moab to prepare for the 100-year flood.

“The next big flood could happen today,” Black said. “We’re doing everything as if it’s going to happen today … So we’re working [as] quickly as we can to move these projects along.”

Note to readers • Lizzie Ramirez is a Report for America corps member covering local government and tourism in Grand County for The Times-Independent. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories. Please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.

This story was first published by The Times-Independent.