State Street River: Salt Lake City's 1983 Flood

Find out how a season of terrible floods left Salt Lake City residents with a memorable scene: their neighbors packing sandbags to create a river running down State Street.

The uncharacteristically wet winter and spring seasons between 1982 and 1983 set the stage for historic floods and mudslides throughout Utah. For months, officials worried about record rainfall and increased snowpack, anticipating that warmer weather would result in disaster. Water managers throughout the state lowered reservoirs, but stood no chance against the warming temperatures and increasing runoff. Their fears proved correct on Memorial Day weekend when temperatures rose, causing massive floods from Thistle to Bountiful -- and even Great Salt Lake!

State workers responded quickly. On May 26, 1983, Salt Lake County declared an emergency and diverted rising waters from Red Butte, Emigration, and Parleys Creeks. In their race to control the floods, officials overlooked the swelling City Creek in downtown Salt Lake's Memory Grove Park. As the water rapidly rose, city engineers diverted the runoff down State Street to a storm drain a few blocks away. Thousands of volunteers responded to their call for help, hauling and stacking heavy sandbags in an effort to channel the runaway waters.

The diversion resulted in the "State Street River," a makeshift waterway nearly two feet deep gushing down the road that leads from the Utah State Capitol building. Unsurprisingly, the new river caused major issues with commuters and downtown businesses, prompting the city to send out crews to build pedestrian bridges over the floodwaters. Recreation-lovers embraced the new river. Some cast fishing lines alongside State Street, while kayakers complained that the bridges left too little headroom to paddle downstream! Within a couple of weeks, City Creek receded and its waters channeled beneath North Temple, taking with it the State Street River.

For those who lived through the event, it isn't just the stress of battling the flood, or the sidewalk fishermen, or even the kayakers that they remember. No, most striking were the thousands of community-minded volunteers who spent their holiday weekend filling and placing sandbags to halt flood damage in order to protect their neighborhood's businesses and save their downtown.