Weber County Emergency Management Coordinator Ian Johnson told the Standard-Examiner on Tuesday that there isn’t much in the way of flooding anticipated in Weber County.

“We’re just not anticipating much of anything,” he said. “The snowpack, especially with these warm temps … is way down, especially the low-elevation stuff. It’s pretty much gone.”

He noted that doesn’t mean there weren’t a couple of scares along the way.

“We got a little nervous about a month ago when we had that first warm, wet rain storm come through there on the First of January,” he said. “We were a little bit nervous of some rain-on-snow type of stuff, but we got through that without any real issue at all.”

Johnson said a major factor mitigating the flood risk was the dry summer and fall that preceded a winter that was slow to start for the region.

“It was terrible to start off the water year, especially the fall,” he said. “We had such a dry fall that when the ground did freeze and we did get that snow on the ground, the soil underneath it was bone dry because we just had such a dry fall. That’s definitely going to reduce the runoff efficiency when that dry soil thaws. The water generally runs into that dry soil and doesn’t make it all the way to our reservoirs.”

He said that a recent wave of storms have helped the situation somewhat.

“With those warm, spring rain-snow storms that we got in January, it helped the soil moisture a little bit and thawed out some of the soil so they could take on some of that water,” he said. “We’re anticipating an efficient runoff. Most of what we get with the runoff, we should be able to capture pretty efficiently and get it into the reservoirs where we can store it.”

On Tuesday, the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District posted on Facebook that the basin’s snowpack figures are just about average, hovering at 96% of average snow-water equivalent for this time of year — in line with much of the rest of the Wasatch Front. This is in contrast with central and southern Utah which are seeing snow-water equivalent numbers as low as 27% of average.

“Right now, we’re really, really happy that our reservoirs are full because we’re starting to trend toward that southern Utah picture where they’re just looking at another really, really bad drought year down there,” Johnson said. “Water supply-wise, we’re doing great.”

Johnson said that while flood risks appear minimal now, there is precedence for late-winter surprises.

“We’ve seen a couple of rounds of that late-February into mid-March where we’ve gotten some really big storms that have really added to the snowpack,” he said. “Barring that, we’re just not anticipating a really strong runoff season this year.”

He said rain and snow anticipated along the northern Wasatch Front later this week isn’t predicted to constitute one of those surprises.

“We’ll get a little bit of snow out of it in the high elevations, but same story with the last few storms — the lower elevations is maybe a half-inch of snow around 5,500 feet as it moves through and it’ll all be melted by Sunday.”