Provo Canyon community concerned river will breach walls, sandbags
May 4, 2023, 7:10 PM | Updated: May 7, 2023, 7:48 pm
The Wildwood community is made up of 45 cabins. It’s a place a lot of families escape to for summer and winter holidays.
Now they feel threatened by the river that runs through it.
“There’s only about 5-6 of us that live here year-round,” resident Janice Robertson said.
Many of the cabins in the Wildwood community are more than 100 years old.
“When it started, women came up and pitched tents,” Robertson said.
Homeowners like Janice Robertson lovingly refer to the North Fork of the Provo River as the creek.
“Many of the kids were baptized in this river,” she said.
Now, the waters are too rough for rope swinging and swimming.
Robertson said, “It’s causing undercutting underneath some of these walls and we’re afraid if that gives way, we’ll be in a lot of trouble.”
The rising water of the North Fork of the Provo River might be more than one little community can take. I talked to a couple of homeowners in the Wildwood community. They’ve built a levee out of sandbags. They said they need help clearing the river of debris.
Story at 6 @KSL5TV pic.twitter.com/6NhxqMfBMh— Shelby Lofton (@newswithShelby) May 4, 2023
Kevin Forsyth is the caretaker of this community. He said, “This winter we had a record-breaking snow and that really brought down a lot of our tree limbs.”
All of that dead wood now lies along the riverbanks.
“The logs will get caught and pull back in the river and cause a lot of problems downstream,” Forsyth said.
The neighborhood has built its own sandbag wall over time.
Forsyth explained, “If the water level continues to rise, we’re talking instead of patchworking individual cabins, having to build a half-mile-long wall with 3-4,000 sandbags.”
They’re running out of space. The river nearly backs up to back doors.
“You can’t just stack another row on top. You have to build out the base wide and wider,” he added.
This might be all they can do.
Forsyth said, “We were hoping to see some more government involvement with things. We can’t put heavy equipment in the river.”
They’re working to preserve the properties where generations of families have made memories over the last century.
Robertson said, “We want to keep this kind of community. It’s very few and far between and very precious.”
The community is expecting to see peak flow on June 1. They’re hoping they can get outside help with clearing the river before then.
