In February 1983, as massive flooding threatened to cause damage and disruption to Salt Lake City, tens of thousands of residents gathered in Washington Square Park to help fill sandbags.
, with some areas of the state, like the Lower Sevier basin, seeing up to double the amount of snowfall than it would in an average year.
“All winter long, the rain and the snow were heavy,” Barker told The Tribune. “Really extraordinary levels.” “It just stayed wet and stayed cold, right up to Memorial Day weekend,” Barker said. Then it got hot. Barker recalled tens of thousands of people heading to Washington Square to help fill and distribute sandbags. “We called everybody, no matter what the religion,” Ted Wilson said. “We were using people to test their Christianity. And it worked. They came down.”
Much of the damage in the county was limited to the Jordan River and the county’s creeks, like the creeks flowing out of Big and Little Cottonwood canyons. The creek beds and banks at that time were washed out. The Memorial Day weekend floods weren’t the worst Utah catastrophes from spring runoff, just the most memorable. Just a month before the flooding, an enormous mudslide in Spanish Fork Canyon buried U.S. Highway 6 and all but consumed the town of Thistle. Other areas of the state also suffered during the spring runoff, as Davis and Sanpete counties saw mudslides destroy homes.
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