Utah Lake has a legal shoreline, and it is older than Vineyard. In 1872 Salt Lake County built a dam across the Jordan River at the Narrows to raise water into its canals. The next spring the Utah County court complained that the lake had risen onto its farmers' land. The two counties never settled the matter, and the dam washed out, according to Salt Lake County's records, "helped by persons unknown." It was rebuilt in 1874 and raised in 1880, and Utah County landowners protested louder each time.
In 1885 an arbitration committee led by John Taylor, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, fixed a compromise elevation for the lake and rules for the gates at its outlet. When the water reached that line, the gates were to be opened. A commission with two members from each county and a referee ran the gates for the next century, and a monument near the shore marked the agreed level.
A shallow lake and a flat shore
The stakes were highest on shores like Vineyard's. The lake averages only about 9 feet deep when full, and along much of its north, east and south edges the bed drops just 1 to 3 feet for every 1,000 feet out from shore. A rise of a foot or two moves the water's edge a long way inland. For generations, landowners had complained that storing water in the lake sometimes flooded thousands of acres of farmland around it.
The spring of 1983
The winter of 1982 to 1983 brought record precipitation to Utah, and a deep snowpack sat in the mountains into late spring. Over Memorial Day weekend 1983 temperatures climbed into the 90s, and the snow came down all at once. The Provo River peaked at 2,400 cubic feet per second, about a million gallons a minute. In Lehi, volunteers filled sandbags and crews pulled out bridges before the current could jam against them. Governor Scott Matheson, declaring an emergency, summed up the season: "This is a hell of way to run a desert."
Utah County had other disasters that spring. By mid April the ancient Thistle landslide had moved far enough to cut U.S. 89, U.S. 6 and the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad in Spanish Fork Canyon. Benchland slides damaged streets and homes between Highland and Provo. The Utah National Guard was called out across the state to build and repair dikes and levees, and by one count flooding cost Utah more than $621 million that year.
The lake rose more slowly than the rivers, and it kept rising after they fell. North of the lake near Lehi, residents cut brush and sandbagged to keep the water out. "Some homes turned into islands," remembered Russ Felt, a longtime Lehi resident and local historian. A small white house at a bend on Saratoga Road stood alone in the water. South of Provo, crews built embankments to keep the lake off Interstate 15. In Salt Lake County, the Jordan River ran brimful, partly because of the effort to lower Utah Lake.
On September 15, 1983, the Utah Lake Landowners Association filed a class action suit. It accused Salt Lake County, the Associated Canal Companies and everyone else claiming Utah Lake water of breaking the 1885 compromise, and it sought damages and an order to stop the flooding of shoreline land.
Record water
The next year was worse. Wet weather continued, and on June 15, 1984, the lake reached a record 5.46 feet above its compromise level, the highest in 101 years of record. Federal hydrologists later tied the flood mainly to a large El Nino of 1983 and 1984 and put damage at $5.9 million. The water spread across many acres of farmland around the lake, and very high levels lingered for several years. Even Saratoga, the lake's oldest resort, lost customers to rumors that it had been swallowed.
This is a hell of way to run a desert.Gov. Scott Matheson, 1983
The 1984 Legislature appropriated $1.5 million to the state's Disaster Relief Board, with $500,000 set aside for engineering studies of the lake and the Jordan River. The studies settled an old grudge. For a century Utah County landowners had blamed the dams at the Jordan Narrows for backing water onto their land, but engineers found the real choke point was natural, a rock sill at Indian Ford, south of Camp Williams.
The answer was a flood management program costing more than $10 million. It built a new outlet structure at the lake, dredged the lake and the Jordan River, modified five diversion structures and replaced the Joint Dam below the Narrows. Later in the decade, engineers dredging the river also removed the top few feet of the Indian Ford sill, roughly doubling how fast the lake could drain when full, from about 500 to about 1,050 cubic feet per second.
With the work planned, the lawsuit settled. On March 8, 1985, the parties agreed that floods on Utah Lake and the Jordan River would be managed under a new operating plan rather than the 1885 agreement. The goal was to bring the lake back to compromise by the end of each runoff season, using National Weather Service forecasts, with a flood control manager from each county added to the commission and the state engineer as tiebreaker. The deal also capped the Jordan River at 3,400 cubic feet per second at 2100 South in Salt Lake City. A new compromise elevation was set at 4,489.0455 feet above sea level.
The new line
That river cap carried a cost for the east shore. When the Jordan reaches its limit, the gates must be throttled, and the lake rises again. In 2011, a year of record snowpack, the Deseret News reported that the cap could cost Utah County farms and ranches along the shore some acreage, in exchange for less flooding along the river in Salt Lake County.
Ideas to tame the lake by walling off parts of it never went far. Engineers have noted that a dike across Provo Bay would need flood bypass channels for Hobble Creek and other streams and pumping stations big enough to lift flood water over the dike, which would be very costly. Diked land would still face several feet of flooding every 30 years or so at the peak of wet cycles.
The water receded, and Vineyard incorporated as a town in 1989. Provo officials said in 2011 that the lake had not come within four feet of its 1984 peak since. When the state opened the outlet gates in February 2024 to keep the lake at compromise, it was the first such flood release since 2011, and the line drawn in 1885 and redrawn in 1985 was still doing its work.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-lake-over-its-line/
