Mayor Petersen said more flooding could be a possibility

Last week, President Trump opened up federal funds to help alleviate damage from February flooding in Northern Utah. But more problems could be just ahead. On KVNU’s Speak to the Mayor hour during For the People on Wednesday, Logan Mayor Craig Petersen reviewed problems the city had with flooding back in 1983 and more recently in 2011.

He said an expert from NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, more commonly known as the weather service, talked to city officials this past Friday and said more flooding woes could be on the horizon.

“The message from the gentleman from NOAA is that potentially 2017 could be a combination of both those years. We have a huge snowpack and that problem is exacerbated by the fact that we’ve got continuing rain. We’ve had rain all this week, we have rain forecast into next week,” warned the mayor.

“So we not only had a big snowpack but we continue to accumulate and if in the latter part of May or the first part of June, we were to have a series of hot days, we could have some significant flooding problems. Again I don’t want to be Chicken Little, but he suggested that we might actually experience record flows on some of our rivers,” Petersen said.

The mayor said the Logan River might be more of a concern than some of the other rivers this time around. But he stressed that the city is very aware of the potential later this spring and is monitoring the situation.

He said based on the models the weather service uses to predict temperatures and accumulated snowpack and how those factors will effect river levels, sand bags will be prepared and other measures taken based on possible impacts.

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