Fountain Green, Utah, suffered a major flood on Sunday, August 18th, 2024. At least five families and possibly more than 10 were displaced by the flooding.

In my eighty-eight years, I have never seen anything like what rolled in Sunday afternoon (18 August 2024). Heavy winds, dark clouds and torrential rains by the buckets full and hail. I made a video of the flood it caused behind our house in the canal the county had us build in 1992 in case of same. Thank you, Sanpete County, for your foresight. The deluge was going over the bridge and then it cavitated about 24 cubic yards and about nine feet deep past the bridge. On Sunday during that deluge in an hour we had 1/4th of the annual rainfall. You can see in the picture below the cavitation, as our neighbors look down at it from the bridge.

Then on the next day, Monday, it rained again on the saturated terrain and flooded Fountain Green again.

During the flood, the property we built our home on looked like a ship with a flood of water running down the south side and a flood of water running down the north side. We felt enormously blessed that none of the flood waters came into our home. We felt like Noah on his ark. We were hoping and praying as we felt this mighty storm beat down around us. THANK YOU, LORD, for thine angels and Thy protecting hand!

Our City Manager, Curt Nielsen, who knows water volume calculations told me that 490 million gallons of water fell on this area during that storm. My Dad and my brother Dean and I took a group down Cataract Canyon on the Colorado River at flood stage: 40,000 cubic feet per second. That flow for half an hour would be the same as Curt’s calculations of a half billion gallons of water dumped on this town. Joseph Papenfuss, who is a scientist, calculated that it was a 1000-year flood.

During the deluge, there was a river of mud and gravel running down Big Springs Road and into Fountain Green. I am guessing over 100 cubic feet per second. Several basements were flooded in town. The flood burst the window on the basement of our rental home down at the corner–filling up the basement and onto the main floor. There was about nine feet of water in the basement taking it up to the main floor. The flood destroyed the water heater and the furnace in the basement, and all the floor coverings on the main floor. Scott Sims, our daughter, McKaylee’s husband, who is a disaster relief expert, came by early on. With his special equipment detected what we needed to discard and what we could keep.

The hurricane-force winds tore off some facia on our home and ripped off a big section of the south end of our barn. You  can see that in the above picture. It also tore off two of the panels from the geodesic dome. One was clear out next to the fence by the road. If it had been in the road, it would have washed down to Fountain Green!

Fox News featured the flood, and the Red Cross has moved into town. I just learned from our City Manager that a disaster relief team is coming to help.

Curt Nielsen, the Fountain Green City Manager, rents the home down the street from us. We could not ask for a better person to work with—especially with this flood disaster. They had a big crew of people there helping with the cleanup and getting all kinds of fans to dry things out. He joked with me, “We have more Indians than Chiefs.” Neither of us has flood insurance, so the tab and work are all on us. We are so grateful for all the helping hands.

Our neighbors, Kevin and Natalie Wright are the best you could ever want. Kevin had his tractor going and dug trenches and berms to protect their property and the neighbors down the street. The damage at our rental would have been much worse had he not been there doing his most timely and caring work.

The response of the Fountain Green folks has been most heartwarming in their willingness to help one another. Many of them are having their own disaster problems, yet they still reach out to help wherever they can. Maybe the Lord is getting us ready to be a ZION people.

I share the Fox News link here: Small central Utah town hit extra hard by flooding (fox13now.com). You can feel the compassion and caring attitude of this community.

David W. Allan (21 August 2024)