The following is excerpted from the Deseret News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
Sunday, May 29, 1983, 6:30 a.m.: A phone rings on the nightstand in the mayor’s bedroom. It can’t be good news, with a surge in warmer temperatures and record snowpack in the Wasatch mountains of northern Utah. Ted Wilson has spent enough time up there skiing and climbing and guiding others to visualize the day’s first light glimmering across the white surface, spawning droplets of water, forming rivulets that become torrents as they crash through the canyons above Salt Lake City. Nervous, he reaches for the landline.
A woman speaks, alarmed. She’s a city council member who lives in the Avenues, an older neighborhood of tree-lined streets and Craftsman-style homes on the hillside north of downtown, along the eastern rim of City Creek Canyon. Looking down on the park where that canyon ends, she describes a river gone insane, flush with snowmelt, bucking against its banks. If something isn’t done, and soon, downtown will be underwater.
City Creek is a small mountain stream, about 15 miles long, fed by runoff and natural springs, but it provided enough water to draw early settlers — members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — to this corner of a broad and arid valley. Later, as the city grew into an urban center, its importance to farming faded. By 1909, City Creek had been channeled underground and out of the way. But that conduit was not built to handle a record 26-inch snowpack liquefying at a terrifying rate.
Wilson knows the stakes. The month before, excess groundwater had cut loose the side of a mountain about 65 miles south, burying the small town of Thistle. And memories are still fresh of the 1976 failure of Teton Dam, 250 miles north in Idaho. There, after a 15-foot wall of water and rubble hit Rexburg, locals rallied together to help victims rebuild. What if Salt Lake City could mobilize them on the front end? “I need an army,” he thinks.
His first call is to Latter-day Saint church headquarters, a 28-story monolith a half-mile downstream from the park. A security guard answers. “I need to talk to the president,” Wilson tells him. It’s an odd request for the spiritual leader of more than five million souls worldwide, including most of the people living in the state of Utah at that time. “It’s Sunday,” the guard says, perplexed. “Why do you need to talk to the president?”
The mayor tells him: “Because I need him to cancel church.”
To read the full article and see the incredible photos of this incident, CLICK HERE.
Rochelle HaleApril 13, 2023
I remember this unbelievable event. We lived south of downtown, but we still filled sandbags in our neighborhood as a precaution. I was pregnant, but my husband headed out to help with whatever was needed. Our son was born later in the year and was blessed on a day when winter snow came early, a precursor to a cold, wet winter for 1983-84 as well.