Bear Lake. wildlife.utah.gov
CACHE COUNTY — Earlier this week, Cache Water District Manager Nathan Daugs presented to the Cache County Council the overall outlook for the Bear River basin.
On KVNU’s For the People program on Wednesday, he said the hydrologic outlook, as you might expect, is good news and bad.
“Yeah, we’re happy that we have a really good snowpack to fill the reservoirs and send a lot of water to the Great Salt Lake. But there is still certainly potential for flooding, I think it just depends on what level of flooding we have it.
“I think at this point, there’s bound to be flooding along the river ways, it’ll just depend on if it’s just manageable flooding or flooding that causes damage,” he explained.
While some reservoirs in the northern tier of the state are being drained some, overall, Daugs said that’s not the case yet in the Bear River drainage area.
“To some degree, we don’t have any really major reservoirs other than Bear Lake in the Bear system and Bear Lake’s got plenty capacity so they’re not draining water, they’re putting everything they can into Bear Lake right now,” he explained. “So we really have Porcupine, Hyrum and Newton are the other reservoirs of any size on the system. Newton probably won’t fill this year because it was pretty well empty last year.”
He said there is some drainage from Porcupine and Hyrum reservoirs to provide capacity for the flood waters when they happen.
As far as rivers, Daugs said the Logan River probably won’t see peak flows until sometime in June.