The main concern is there is a sinkhole beside the southern dam on Boyer Lake, about 20 miles east of Coalville in the Uintas, accessed via Chalk Creek Road.
At the July 16 Summit County Council meeting, engineer Chris Thomsen told councilmembers the sinkhole drains water from Boyer Lake when it's full, but officials aren’t sure where it goes.
Crews plug and maintain the hole each year, and now the Utah Division of Water Resources has received a grant and is putting thousands of dollars toward a more permanent fix.
“[Utah Division of Water Resources] Dam Safety does a regular check on it, and it's not imminent that it’s going to fail,” Thomsen said. “The concern is that if they don't get fixed, the state will start saying you can't put as much water in it, and that's what's really going to affect the residents of Summit County.”
Thomsen said Boyer Lake provides an estimated 1,600 acre-feet of water to 2,000 residents around Coalville.
So at the meeting, county councilmembers agreed to oversee spending the $715,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fix it.
That money covers 65% of the overall project cost, according to DWR project manager Ben Marett. A $385,000 DWR grant covers the rest.
As part of the agreement, the county gets to keep up to 5% of the FEMA money to reimburse it for overseeing the project.
The project will also involve widening the southern dam slightly, bolstering the dam slopes, improving the spillway and updating the dam’s emergency action plan.
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