(DCWatchdog.com) – A day after fierce storm waters hammered several northern Utah communities, residents are still grappling with the aftermath.
Watch the video further down this post.
“Over about a 30-minute period, we received about an inch of rain,” said Chris Tschirki, Public Works Director for Orem City. “We would consider it to be greater than a 100-year storm event.”
Orem was hit especially hard by severe rain and hailstorms, which left some people with serious damage.
Resident Jeffrey Turner expressed his frustration, “I had a foot-and-a-half of hail piled up in front of my garage door. All the neighbors were grabbing buckets, trying to get the water out so we could see what the damage was.”
Turner had nearly two inches of water seep into his garage, but he fared better than others nearby.
“It was shocking, really,” said landlord Jackson Knapp. “We weren’t expecting it. We thought it would be something really minor.”
He added, “It’s been heartbreaking for us as landlords to see them have to go through that. “It’s not fun.”
Moreover, Knapp has had to tear out the carpet and drywall in the unit. The insulation and doors will also require extensive repairs.
While the storm drainage system across the city was flooded, Tschirki stated that such events occur infrequently and that he had never seen one like this in Orem in 30 years.
He also underscored that they do not design anything to handle storms like those, and to manage them, they would have had to install 6-7-foot diameter pipes on many roads throughout the city, which would have been very cost-prohibitive.
The Orem Skate Park made headlines after turning into a makeshift skate pool, which is actually what it was designed to do.
“We have about 20 detention basins that we’ve designed across the city. This is one of them, at 400 North 1200 West, and there’s also a skate park tied to this basin that allows water to be detained here as well,” explained Tschirki.
Even though most of the city’s infrastructure functioned as intended, the storm was simply too intense.
“We design our system to handle what I would consider to be very reasonable storms,” Tschirki concluded.
VIDEO | Surge of flood water crashes through window in Orem, Utah#iawx #utwx
— Bobby Ellison (@BobbyEllisonKY) August 16, 2024
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