Jim Ence
Santa Clara, UT

Written by Jim Ence

I don't know that I would classify it as a hundred year flood, but I hope it was.   I think most of this flood came out of the Moody Wash area where the fire was this summer.   We got snow out there and it rained on it and there was nothing to hold it and so it came down.

There were three heroes who really worked for us down here--one was Terry Brotherson. He is contractor from Mt. Pleasant and he came by jest to check on us. I think it was more than a hunch. I think he was guided here. He came in the nick of time. It was more than I could do with the backhoe so he got a trackhoe here and we started to build the dike up. Bart Smith came down and decided we needed another trackhoe so he called got one from Entrada. For the most part our hands were tied. We couldn't do anything. That's what happened all up and down the creek because nobody know what to do.

Terry showed up and then Bart got here and they decided to start hauling rocks. Nobody hired them; they just called them and asked them to bring trucks and trackhoes and they came. Shan Gubler was here, too. He is a partner with Bart and they kind of took things in hand. We were putting all our energies down here on this dike, not realizing that it was getting worse and worse above the post office and it was Shan who came back and said there were problems upstream and we should start putting our efforts there.

On Tuesday morning I went to my dental office and was there for three hours when I got word the flood was even larger up at Gunlock, so I cancelled the day and called Debbie and told her to get things ready--important papers and pictures and things she wanted to take out. I got home and I was in denial about it, but everybody was pitching in. I decided if we all waited until the last hour to move out we would have a real mess. We decided since my brother, Ken, is handicapped, we'd move his house out first. Sheldon Wittwer brought over some of their delivery vans and we loaded Ken's house up. Then we waited a couple of hour and I made a decision that if we moved out it may be the wrong thing to do, but if some damage happened to our house, we would be glad we took the time to do it. We had 75 to 100 people here and it took less than one hour to haul everything out.

Fortunately, when the flood was over, we had a house to put it all back into.

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