TOOELE COUNTY, Utah — The rain may have stopped, but the impact from Saturday's storm is still being felt across Tooele County. County officials and weather experts say what happened over the weekend was one for the books.
Officials say the storm was much stronger than what the area's drainage system is built to handle. "In Stansbury, it could be considered a 500-year storm based off of the amount of rainfall, which is not something we had reported in this area before," Brittany Lopez, assistant county manager for Tooele County, said Monday.
The National Weather Service says Stansbury Park received 3.74 inches of rain between Friday night and Saturday, the most rain recorded anywhere across Tooele Valley and Salt Lake Valley.
"This was a pretty impressive rainstorm," Jim Steenburgh, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah said.
Lopez says the county's system is designed to handle up to what's called a 100-year storm, which means there's a 1% chance of the event happening in any given year. "If these '100-year rain events' become more frequent in the future, then we should probably be thinking about improving our infrastructure to deal with potentially some larger precipitation events," Steenburgh said.
He says heavy rainfall is something we could see more often in Utah. "Globally, we're seeing the more extreme events getting bigger, so that would mean an increase of frequency of the largest events," Steenburgh said. "Big rain events or even big snow events are something we would expect to see moving forward."
Want to see if your area is at risk? Go to Floodhazards.utah.gov, enter your address, and explore the map to see whether your area falls within a flood zone.
Sandbags are still available at the Pine Canyon Fire Station, the Stansbury Park Improvement District shop, and Tooele City Fire Station 3. Tooele County Emergency Management urges residents to report flood-related damage through their reporting system or by texting the number 435-833-8181.
“Even though there were some negative impacts, I think this is going to be a very beneficial event as we move into the water year," Steenburgh said.
