Tom Newman and Willamae Graham woke up in the middle of the night to shouting.

“It’s bad! It’s bad!” their stepson Austin Shavanaux yelled. “It’s really, really bad!”

It was around 1 a.m. Sunday and a rush of water had just crashed through Shavanaux’s window in his basement bedroom and directly into his bearded dragon’s enclosure. He began digging for his pet reptile but couldn’t find her, then hurried upstairs with his cat, Sadie Kitty, to wake his parents.

The home on Salt Lake City’s west side was one of 15 swamped by a water main break near 500 South and Emery Street. The gush displaced four families, including Shavanaux’s.

The city has offered some help with disaster cleanup, but some families say it isn’t enough, and are frustrated with the lack of clarity on what the city can and can’t pay for.

Salt Lake City Public Utilities Department spokesperson Chloe Morroni said officials are still speaking with residents, and the city is also working on a recovery plan.

Most, if not all, of Shavanaux’s belongings were destroyed in the flooded basement, while Newman and Graham were still working on Wednesday to see what they could save from the rest of their waterlogged home.

The couple, along with their husky, Arctic Circle, and German shepherd, Marshmallow, have been forced to live in a trailer in the back of their home while cleanup efforts continue, they said. Shavanaux and his cat are sleeping in a tent next to the trailer to keep the animals separated.

Millie, the bearded dragon who was a gift to Shavanaux, died in the flood, Newman said.

“It’s just been a nightmare,” Graham said.

A gush of water

Early Sunday, a 20-inch break in a water line under 500 South caused a torrent of pressurized water to flood beneath the street, said Jesse Stewart, deputy director of the Utilities Department. The deluge, he said, created a car-size sinkhole in the street and then “flowed where the drainage took it.”

City utility workers responded immediately to stop the water, Stewart said. The city’s risk assessment team arrived at the line break between 4 and 5 a.m., working with the response team to make sure residents got updates, he added.

Officials have encouraged residents to work with their private insurance companies or file a claim with the city, Stewart said. For now, Salt Lake City has disaster cleanup crews pumping water out from homes and treating drywall to stop mold. Water service to residents has not been disrupted.

“The repairs are a primary objective for the utility right now,” Stewart said Tuesday, “but it could be a few days before we get things cleaned up out there as far as the hole in the ground and the repair to the water line.”

Public utilities engineers are still investigating what caused the water line to break, Stewart said. The pipe is around 60 years old, but the city hadn’t had any issues with it in the past.

The water line may not be fully repaired until next week, Stewart said.

“We recognize that not all households have the same amount of loss,” Morroni, the utilities spokesperson, said in an email. “We are working with residents individually to understand the circumstances affecting each home and help where we can. Our goal is to assist residents with the immediate needs of water removal and mold mitigation while the investigation into the cause of the incident continues.”

Bracing for a monthslong cleanup

Newman’s house is one of the closest to the burst pipe, and was one of the homes hit the hardest by damage. Two days before the flooding, he purchased a $5,000 water heater, which ended up fully submerged.

“Our whole house got flooded,” Graham said. “You can see the garbage, the mud, that’s been contaminated with waste and dog waste that’s been in the yards. …
We got some rooms with no power in them.”

Graham is supposed to be on oxygen at night, but she doesn’t know if her oxygen machine still works — they have been unable to reach it “for days” because of the water inside their home, she said. And cleaning up the house — a task that has fallen on residents — is difficult in the stifling humidity.

While disaster crews have helped pump water and place dehumidifiers in the home, Newman’s homeowner insurance won’t cover any kind of water damage. Newman said he has received phone calls from utility officials telling him his family can file a claim with the city for the damages, but he isn’t sure how to do that.

The city says its risk team is still reaching out to affected residents to help them understand next steps and how to file claims.

“My computer isn’t even working,” Graham added. “I don’t know if the heat in here fried it or what.”

A few doors down, the Flores family also faced a rush of water. Their basement was fully flooded and water on the main floor was about a foot deep. On Wednesday, the high water mark was still visible on the family’s furniture.

Misael Flores’ uncle lives downstairs, and woke up the rest of the family early Sunday so they could grab what they could and get out, Flores said. The family’s four small dogs were outside, and three of them had sought refuge from the knee-high floodwaters on top of their dog house.

Another one of the family dogs, Chiquis, was found swimming in the water near the fence, he said.

The city’s disaster cleanup experts have provided the family with a few pumps to get the water out, but they needed more help — and their insurance helped pay for that, Flores said. On Thursday, crews were ripping out drenched drywall at their home.

The family is staying at Flores’ sister’s home for now, and insurance also provided funding for them to stay at an Airbnb for a month.

But Flores is bracing for the cleanup to “take months, probably half a year.”

On Wednesday, the family was still going through the house to determine what they could save.

One of their cars was parked in the backyard, and Flores said they are unsure what kind of repairs it may need due to the water damage. Flores’ uncles also stored electric tools the family used for work in the backyard, and they were testing which ones needed to be replaced due to the damage.

Banding together

Next door, Shirley Reyes and her family were also displaced from the flooding.

She lived in the basement — which she had recently remodeled — and all her furniture was destroyed from the water damage. Reyes wasn’t home at the time water began pouring into the house, she said, so her mother grabbed as much as she could and threw it on her bed upstairs to save it from the rising water.

Much of the basement was underwater early Sunday, and rooms on the main floor also received water damage. Despite fans and dehumidifiers working to keep the house dry, bubbled up paint from trapped moisture could still be seen on some of the walls on the main floor Wednesday.

Reyes’ mother and grandfather are currently staying with her sister, while Reyes is couch surfing with friends for the time being.

“[Disaster workers] have been keeping us up to date as much as they can,” Reyes said. “They basically have just told us it’s day by day that things are just super different. Like, from one day they’re saying, ‘the city can cover this,’ and then they’re saying, ‘OK, wait, maybe the city can cover that.’ So that’s still up in the air of what is it that they can cover.”

Because each home has been impacted differently by the flooding, the city said it cannot provide a specific timeline on resolving individuals’ needs.

Meanwhile, as families clean up and work to determine what their insurances will cover, investors have been calling, Reyes said.

“It’s very predatory, especially how vulnerable everybody is right now,” she said. “The fact that we have some elderly folks over there that are veterans, and we have intergenerational families that speak a different language — and so I think we’re all just really trying to stick together to make sure that we’re getting like the best outcome possible for everybody, not just one of us.”

Shirley said residents affected by the flooding are working to catalog what their damages are, what insurance will cover and what else they need before going to the city or putting together a donation drive.

“When accidents like this happen … we don’t need empty promises, we don’t need lip service, we actually need support,” Reyes said. “So the question is, what is the city going to do to hold themselves accountable to this?”

— Tribune reporter Jose Davila IV contributed to this story.