Cedar City mopping up after Saturday floods

Neighbors pitch in after record rainfall pounds the area.

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Cedar City • Residents of Cedar City worked Sunday morning to clean up the damage from Saturday's flooding and prepare for more storms on Sunday night.

Iron County sheriff's dispatchers said they received more than 220 calls on Saturday night from people with homes that were damaged by the flooding, mostly on Cedar City's west side.

Saturday's rainfall broke the area's daily record, with 2.25 inches falling in about an hour at the Cedar City airport, according to Dan Brown, meteorologist for the National Weather Service. That beat the previous daily record of 2.1 inches on Sept. 24, 1967.

The roof of the secondary building of MetalCraft Technologies, 400 N. 1400 West, appears to have collapsed due to heavy rains, according to dispatchers at the Cedar City Fire Department. No one was injured.

One of the hardest-hit areas was the Equestrian Pointe neighborhood, where members of the LDS Church's Cedar City 11th Ward worked for about three hours on Sunday morning to remove water and begin repairs to 19 homes, according to Tyler Albrecht, the ward's bishop. He said at least five basements were destroyed.

Albrecht said ward members attended church for one hour before splitting into six groups to clean up flood damage. He estimated there were more than 200 ward members working on Sunday morning.

According to Rob Robertson, the ward's first counselor, Albrecht's home received some of the worst damage on Saturday night. Albrecht was out of town at the time, but more than 50 neighbors and members of the ward were able to enter the home and start cleaning up before the Albrecht family returned home about 9:30 p.m.

Terry Sutton, who moved to the neighborhood in 2009 and is not a ward member, praised the effort.

"People can't imagine how this community comes together," Sutton said. "I must have had 50 different people come by my house to ask if I needed any help."

The Iron County Search and Rescue building on Cedar City's west side near the airport had sandbags available for residents. A sheriff's officer was at the site on Sunday supervising prisoners from the jail who were summoned to help fill the bags.