Crews Fix Damage From Failed Culvert
Apr 18, 2019, 7:39 PM | Updated: 7:41 pm
WEBER COUNTY, Utah — Finally. Instead of having to deal with cold, snowy, and rainy weather, Thursday was a great day to be outside.
It’s a good thing it was nice, because workers fixing damage underneath a railroad near Uintah City in Weber County had to be outside no matter what.
“They’re the ones trying to patch it all back together,” said Lance Peterson, who is the Weber County Emergency Management director. “We’ve been really fortunate with the weather today.”
Wednesday night, an old stone culvert that runs underneath railroad tracks failed.
Exactly how the culvert failed is unknown; did it simply collapse from all the rain or was there some type of leak that caused a small crack to grow bigger?
Either way, about half a football field of land on the small hillside where the culvert was located washed away.
That forced train traffic to use other rails, which is why railroad workers were fixing the damage as fast as they could.
Work crews are still fixing the area where a rock culvert failed near Uintah City last night. @WeberCounty says residents don’t need to be concerned this is a sign of something bigger and this doesn’t have anything to do with the wildfire burn scar. That’s a relief. #KSLTV pic.twitter.com/E2wHgxtSfM
— Alex Cabrero (@KSL_AlexCabrero) April 18, 2019
“They’ve been on it since last night. They’ve been here all night long,” said Peterson.
Maybe what’s even more important, is making sure nearby residents in Uintah City feel safe.
Peterson said they have nothing to worry about it and this small slide isn’t a sign of something bigger to come.
“This was a failure of a culvert, not the hillside,” said Peterson. “This was not a mudslide like some people have reported.”
There was a wildfire in this area recently, and burn scars left behind on mountainsides usually come with mudslide concerns.
However, Peterson said that’s not the case here.
“This is not a result of the wildfire that was here a year and a half ago,” he said.
Workers cleaned out a canal that filled with silt as well as replaced the old culvert with a metal one.
That way, even if more rain comes this way, workers won’t have to.
“They’ve just about got it all patched up,” said Peterson. “They are going to put it a new culvert so we hopefully don’t have this problem ever again.”
