Hundreds of fish wash up on family property as Pineview draws down

BRIGHAM CITY — It was supposed to be a routine irrigation cycle, running 10 hours Saturday night, but much more than water came through the canals onto Mandy Kalista's family pasture. Hundreds of mostly catfish washed onto the field.

"What the heck, we have a pond!" Kalista's daughter called out in a cellphone video.

"She said, 'I think there's probably a couple hundred,'" Kalista said, of a phone call with her daughter that night. "I was shocked, but I was more shocked when we started cleaning them up, and I started counting how many I'd put in a bag. And, you know, there was over 1,500 that we cleaned up on Sunday."

There were still dozens more fish on the Kalista property Wednesday, and at least a couple of the fish were still alive. Jeff Humphrey, general manager of Pineview Water Systems, says the water district heard from many customers who had much smaller numbers of fish show up in their yards and fields, but nothing close to the onslaught that Kalista saw. He said the fish became caught in the irrigation canals as levels at Pineview Reservoir were drawn down for a water pipeline repair being done by Ogden City.

"As that reservoir gets lower, the fish have one place to go," Humphrey explained. "They started to school up because that's the last remaining of the water at our inlets at the lowest point of the reservoir."

Humphrey said as soon as the problem was identified, workers started reducing the flow from the inlet. They've now shut down all irrigation except for flows needed at their pump station. He adds that no fish were spotted in those systems.

"You feel bad," Kalista said. "That's a lot of fish to lose."

She adds that there's still a lot of work to be done to clear her family property. They had to stop Sunday, because they'd run out of contractor-strength trash bags.

"We only bought a box of 20 because I really did not think we'd need that many," Kalista said. "And you couldn't fill them all the way full because it gets pretty heavy."

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