With the calendar turning to March, it won’t be long before the mountain snowpack on the Wasatch Front starts making its way down the slopes.

Weber County officials are starting to watch and see if that snowmelt will present a flooding problem in the lower elevations.

Eli Johnson, Weber County emergency management coordinator, told the Standard-Examiner on Thursday that stakeholders are beginning the preliminary monitoring process.

“We did get together on (March 1) — our Office of Emergency Management, the engineering office, public works and basically all of the players that were involved last year: Weber Basin Water (Conservancy District), the National Weather Service, Division of Wildlife (Resources),” he said. “We had a two-hour summit to discuss what we’re looking at as far as snowpack, as far as releases, as far as potentials and all of that.”

He said that, at this point, officials are still on the fence about whether there will be substantial flooding in the Weber Basin this coming spring.

“Our snowpacks are just a little bit above normal,” he said. “We had a lot higher snowpack last year than we do this year, but March to early April is going to be our make or break (period) on what we anticipate.”

Johnson said there are plans for the stakeholders to meet again at the end of the month and then they’ll be able to give a better assessment of the flood risk for the county.

“If it starts looking like we may end up with some high runoff, we’ll start bumping those meetings up and probably start doing them at least weekly and hopefully not get back to the point we were last year where we were doing it daily — sometimes hourly,” he said.

In the meantime, Johnson said the county is still waiting on the status of an appeal of a FEMA disaster declaration for last year’s flooding. The original declaration left Weber County out of receiving compensation despite incurring substantial costs as a result of the 2023 flooding.

Johnson speculated it could be some time before they hear anything.

“I’m thinking with the federal side running under the continuing resolution type of thing, I think until we actually see a budget passed, I don’t know if we’ll get any determination from the federal side,” he said. “In 2011 when we had our flooding, we kind of had the same situation.”

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