When the Mud Ran Amuck

The citizens of Farmington, Utah, will never forget the sound. "The trees were popping and the boulders rolling," recalls Steve Moon of the fire department. "Anybody who wouldn't be nervous listening to that coming down the hill, there's just got to be something wrong with them." What came down the hill was mud: tons and tons of soggy, slippery, onrushing mud. The same thing was happening in the neighboring town of Bountiful, where 1,000 people had to be evacuated. Mud slides and floods all last week caused millions of dollars of damage and the loss of 16 homes in Utah and in western Nevada, where a mucky avalanche off aptly named Slide Mountain caused the death of one man, the Rev. Joseph Valenzuela. Said one of Valenzuela's parishioners, Tim Miller, who survived with a separated shoulder and cracked ribs: "I served quite a few months in Viet Nam, and I'd rather do that than go through something like this again."

According to Bruce Kaliser, chief hazard geologist for the Utah department of natural resources, the soil on mountains in the area is supersaturated because of an abnormally high winter snowpack's melting under suddenly warm spring weather. Torrential rains have further loosened the soil, which has been tumbling down into the canyons, creating an earth dam. As water builds up behind the dams, it is only a matter of time before the unstable materials start to give way and a mud slide is born.

The heavy rains and runoff in Utah turned a main street in Salt Lake City into a river, where enterprising citizens were catching fish. But mud slides in towns to the north pose a greater and continuing danger. "We can control the water, but the mud just goes where it wants to," explained Davis County Deputy Sheriff Harry Jones. "All we can do is try to anticipate where it is going and then get out of the way." Says another deputy, Pat Bird: "When it gets dark, nobody knows when it is coming or where it's coming from, and that's when it gets scary." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.