LOGAN – At the regular meeting of the Logan Municipal Council on Aug. 4, Mayor Mark Anderson took time out to deliver a postmortem on the weekend Canyon Road wildfire and some remarks about lessons learned during that emergency.
The mayor began his remarks by reminding council members of our fortunate local residents were to have city staff and crew respond so quickly and effectively to the fire that started on Friday, July 31 and burned 30 to 40 acres of dry brush on the high ground overlooking Canyon Road.
“It could have been a very much larger fire,” Anderson emphasized. “We could have lost homes and lives…Instead, we had a very good outcome…because of the quick response, the way the fire crews attacked the fire and all the help that came from throughout the county and from the state.”
Anderson was one of the many residents who were evacuated from their homes after the Canyon Road blaze ignited late Friday night and spread rapidly through dry grass above his home.
Logan City police issued a mandatory evacuation order just before 11 p.m. for a 1-mile radius around 600 East and Canyon Road, later expanding the zone to 1.5 miles.
Fire agencies from across Cache Valley rushed to the scene to assist. High winds initially hampered firefighting efforts, but crews managed to hold the flames north of Canyon Road, preventing the fire from entering Logan Canyon.
Residents evacuated along Canyon Road in the Island neighborhood spent the night with others or at emergency shelters that were set up overnight.
Anderson praised Ron Gonsalves, the city’s emergency management director, for coordinating those efforts throughout the weekend and thanked the members of the city council for having the foresight to fund that position back in 2025.
“Ron was literally worth his weigh in gold this weekend,” Anderson said.
The mayor also explained that containing and eventually extinguishing the blaze was very much a team effort. While fire crews and policy did their usual exemplary jobs, Logan Light & Power crews were also involved in protect their nearby infrastructure and the Public Works department was on-hand with heavy equipment.
In terms of lessons learned from the emergency, Anderson that the city staff would be coming up with way to promote the “ready, set, go!” system in recent weeks, so that other residents aren’t caught as flat-footed as he was when those evacuation orders came from local officials.
He also noted that the city’s Everbridge communication system failed to notify Island neighborhood residents as planned during the weekend emergency.
Implemented by the city in 2025, Everbridge is a critical event management platform that was supposed to provide software applications to help organizations manage and respond to critical events.
“We feel like our that communication system that we paid for, that we maintain and that we’ve had residents sign-up for, failed us,” he added.
Anderson said that the fire also demonstrated the need for the ongoing First Dam Storage Tank and Waterline Project as well as the proposed tax increase for 2027.
While the Canyon Road fire was a relatively small blaze, fighting it consumed more then 30 percent of the city’s water reserves. Anderson admits that he personally hates all the disruption associated with storage tank and waterline project, but completion of that effort will double Logan’s water capacity and water pressure levels throughout the city.
The tax increase scheduled to be discussed in a Truth-in-Taxation hearing on Aug. 11 is intended to fund additional personnel for the Logan City Police Department and a new station house for the Logan City Fire Department.