SALT LAKE CITY — The large amounts of rainfall in the Salt Lake Valley and beyond over the weekend were great for ongoing drought conditions, but one expert shared how it all coming at once was not necessarily a good thing.
Traveling from their home in South Carolina, William Manson and his wife caught the brunt of the rain while camping by the Great Salt Lake during their fourth cross-country trip.
“Started at 6, 7 p.m. Friday night, ended at 6, 7 o’clock Saturday. And the water level has gone up in the lake,” said Manson on a much drier Monday.
While Manson was safe inside his RV, residents of Salt Lake City’s Rose Park neighborhood dealt with significant flooding, with neighbors laying down sandbags and scooping up water from their homes in the aftermath.
Overall, the city received a total of 2.4 inches of rain. By comparison, Salt Lake City International Airport saw 3.2 inches all summer, which is still about four inches below average.
“It doesn’t do quite as much good when we get it all at once," explained Utah Department of Natural Resources drought coordinator Laura Haskell. "When you get a lot of debris into the water, you can’t send it to be stored as easily. It can clog up reservoirs, damage streams, so that water sometimes, that water needs to be diverted and not wasted, but not used as effectively as we’d like.”
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It was back in July when Utah was 100% under drought conditions. Haskell said the state hasn't received the precipitation it normally would, so any rainfall helps in some way.
“It seems really far away to be thinking about spring, but we do want the soil to be really wet before we have our snowpack, so that we can keep that snowpack to run off really well in the spring,” she said.
Even after the weekend downpours, the Great Salt Lake remains below the minimum healthy level. The lake typically reaches its low in the fall before it slowly starts to increase.
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For Manson, who is just passing through the Beehive State, he hopes his stay in the rain will bring some positive downpours in the future.
“I’m sure you guys haven’t had any water in a while," he said. "That’s what everybody in town’s been saying. So, we brought it with us. We came into town and down it came."
