The ground Enoch
A hundred square miles of subsidence and a plan that runs to 2080
The Enoch graben, and the water that is not coming back.
The water level in Cedar Valley has fallen by as much as 114 feet since 1939, the ground has followed it down across roughly a hundred square miles, and at least 8.3 miles of earth fissures have opened. Utah's first documented case of that damaging an urban area is here. So is a state plan that starts switching off water rights in 2035. Both are published, and both are answerable questions before an offer.
Start here
The valley is sinking, and in one corner it is splitting as it goes.
Cedar Valley has been pumped harder than it recharges for the better part of a century. The Utah Geological Survey puts the fall in the potentiometric surface, the level water stands at in the aquifer, at as much as 114 feet since 1939. That decline has permanently compacted the fine grained sediments in the aquifer, and compaction underground shows up at the surface as subsidence.
Subsidence on its own is slow and mostly invisible. What makes the north end of this valley different is that the compaction is uneven, because the depth to bedrock changes sharply across a buried fault structure. Where the ground on one side settles more than the ground on the other, the surface pulls apart, and it opens as a crack. That structure is the Enoch graben, and it is the reason this city appears in a state geological report rather than only in a census table.
None of this is a secret and none of it is disputed. It is published, it is mapped, and it has a report number. The right response to it is not alarm and it is not silence. It is homework, on a specific parcel, before an offer.
What the survey measured
114 ft
of decline in the water level since 1939
~100 sq mi
of the valley showing subsidence
8.3 mi
of earth fissures, as a minimum
1.7 in
a year, the fastest ongoing movement measured
The measurements
Nine tenths of a foot in one place, three feet in another, and why.
Two numbers get quoted about Enoch and they mean different things. The largest subsidence measured at an existing survey benchmark anywhere in Cedar Valley is 0.9 feet, and that benchmark is near Enoch City. That is the whole ground going down together, gently, over decades.
The other number is bigger and more local. Across the fissure zone on the west side of the Enoch graben, vertical displacement between one side and the other reaches about three feet in places. That is not the valley sinking; that is one side of a crack sitting lower than the other. It is also still moving, at rates the survey measured as high as an inch and three quarters a year.
The whole of it covers roughly a hundred square miles in two bowls, one at this end of the valley and one down near Quichapa Lake, and a minimum of 8.3 miles of earth fissures have opened across that area. Aerial photography shows the largest fissure here began forming more than fifty years ago, and that it grew about 800 feet further south between 1997 and 2006.
Fifty years of aerial photographs, eight hundred feet of growth in nine of them, and a report you can download.
The one place with damage
A partially developed subdivision, and a sewer line that started running backwards.
The survey is specific about where the fissures have actually damaged anything. In the whole of Cedar Valley, documented infrastructure damage is limited to a partially developed subdivision in Enoch City called Parkview, and a stock watering pond west of Quichapa Lake. That is the list.
At Parkview the largest fissure has displaced street surfaces, curb and gutter and sidewalk, and it has reversed the flow direction of a sewer line, which is the detail that tends to stop people in their tracks. A gravity sewer works because one end is lower than the other; three feet of differential movement is enough to change which end that is.
It is also the first documented case in Utah of subsidence and earth fissures affecting an urban area. Arizona has been dealing with this for decades and has a substantial regulatory literature about it. Utah's example is here, in a city of eight thousand people ten minutes north of Cedar City, which is why a state report exists about it at all.
This is a residential street, not a geological attraction. People do drive out to look, and they should not. Parkview is a partially developed subdivision with houses, private lots and residents on it, and the fissure runs through ground that belongs to somebody. The Utah Geological Survey publishes the mapping and the photographs for anyone who wants to understand the feature. Read the report rather than parking outside a family's house.
The other half of the same problem
A state plan that turns off water rights by date.
The fissures are what over pumping does to the ground. The groundwater management plan is what the state has decided to do about the pumping, and Enoch City sits inside it.
The Cedar City Valley Groundwater Management Plan was adopted on 11 January 2021 by the State Engineer, Teresa Wilhelmsen, under section 73-5-15 of the Utah Code, and it covers Water Right Area 73, which is the whole surface drainage of this valley. Its stated objectives are to keep withdrawals inside safe yield, to safeguard the physical integrity of the aquifer and to protect water quality. That middle objective is the fissures, in legal language.
The arithmetic is stark. Safe yield is estimated at 21,000 acre feet a year. Current average depletion is about 28,000. If every approved and perfected right in the basin were actually used, depletion would be roughly 50,000. So average actual depletion has to come down by about 7,000 acre feet a year, and the mechanism is priority: older rights survive, newer rights are switched off first.
The schedule runs in five phases across forty five years, and it is published rather than discretionary. The State Engineer can move a phase's regulated priority date later if artificial recharge or reduced depletion in the preceding decade has done part of the work, and if safe yield is reached at any point the remaining phases are not implemented.
| Phase | Takes effect | Rights regulated through |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 January 2035 | 31 December 1957 |
| 2 | 1 January 2050 | 31 December 1954 |
| 3 | 1 January 2060 | 31 December 1951 |
| 4 | 1 January 2070 | 31 December 1935 |
| 5 | 1 January 2080 | 25 July 1934 |
From the plan's own table. Each phase also carries a target reduction in depletion, cumulatively about 29,857 acre feet by 2080, which would bring the basin to roughly 21,107 acre feet against a safe yield of 21,000. Read the plan at the Division of Water Rights rather than relying on any summary, including this one.
There is a second track running alongside it. The Central Iron County Water Conservancy District holds approved applications to import water into this basin from Pine and Wah Wah Valleys, and the plan explicitly contemplates that a successful import could increase recharge and feed a voluntary arrangement between water users that offsets future priority regulation. That project has been contested and it is not built, so treat it as a live proposal rather than as a solution already in hand.
What to actually do about it
Five questions, all of them answerable before an offer.
None of this is a reason to write off an Enoch address, and I would be doing you no favours if I pretended it were the only thing about the city worth knowing. Documented damage in the whole valley sits at one partially developed subdivision and a stock pond. Thousands of houses here have no issue of any kind. What it is, is a subject where the answer is knowable in advance and expensive to discover afterwards.
The Utah Geological Survey publishes the mapping. Iron County and Enoch City hold the development records. A geotechnical engineer can look at a specific parcel. A title company can tell you what is recorded against it. Those are ordinary, available steps and they are the whole of the response.
The water plan is a different kind of question and it is a longer horizon. It regulates water rights rather than household taps, and the first phase does not take effect until 2035. For a buyer it matters most on parcels with their own well or with irrigation rights attached, and it matters generally because it is the reason every municipality in this valley is talking about supply.
This is general information, not a geologic or engineering opinion. I am a real estate agent and a lender, not a geologist. Everything on this page comes from published Utah Geological Survey and Division of Water Rights material and is summarised here so that a buyer knows the questions to ask. For any specific property, the answer comes from the survey's own mapping and from a qualified engineer, and it is worth paying for.
Keep reading
More of Enoch on The Local.
Things to do
The top 7, ranked
Seven picks, ranked, and six of them are municipal, free and inside the city limits.
Read the guideThe parks
Old Enoch Heritage Park
Eight city parks, a ball diamond with a snack shack, and a disc golf course in four pieces.
Read the guideWhy there is a town
Johnson's Fort
A spring named on Spanish trade maps, a fort in 1854, and four settlements that became one city.
Read the guideWhat changed
The 2021 flood
A hundred and twenty million gallons in forty five minutes, and almost nobody insured for it.
Read the guideMoving here
Enoch or Cedar City
Seven miles apart, two electric utilities, two rulebooks, and one decision worth a week.
Read the guideThe companion
Enoch, from a local
The parks, the founding, the ground and the water, in one place.
Read the pageQuick answers
The ground, answered.
A buried fault structure at the north end of Cedar Valley where the depth to bedrock changes sharply. Because groundwater pumping has compacted the aquifer's fine grained sediments unevenly across that structure, the surface above it has both subsided and pulled apart, which is how earth fissures form. The Utah Geological Survey maps it and describes it in Special Study 150, published in 2014.
Yes, and they are documented rather than rumoured. The Utah Geological Survey found a minimum of 8.3 miles of earth fissures across roughly a hundred square miles of Cedar Valley, with the most significant of them along the west side of the Enoch graben. Vertical displacement across that fissure zone reaches about three feet in places and the survey measured ongoing movement as fast as an inch and three quarters a year.
The largest subsidence measured at an existing survey benchmark anywhere in the valley is 0.9 feet, and that benchmark is near Enoch City. That figure describes the ground settling as a whole. The larger three foot figure that also gets quoted is something different: it is the vertical difference between the two sides of the fissure zone on the west of the Enoch graben, which is displacement across a crack rather than general subsidence.
Groundwater mining, which is the technical term for pumping more water out of an aquifer than recharge puts back in over the long term. The Utah Geological Survey records that pumping has lowered the potentiometric surface in Cedar Valley by as much as 114 feet since 1939, and that this has permanently compacted fine grained sediments in the aquifer. Permanently is the important word: the compaction does not reverse when water levels recover.
The survey names one place: a partially developed subdivision called Parkview, where the largest fissure has displaced street surfaces, curb and gutter and sidewalk and reversed the flow direction of a sewer line. Across the whole of Cedar Valley the only other documented damage is to a stock watering pond west of Quichapa Lake. It is a residential neighbourhood rather than a site to visit, and the mapping is published for anyone who wants to study the feature.
That is your decision rather than mine, and the honest framing is that this is a knowable question rather than an unknowable risk. Documented damage in the entire valley is limited to one partially developed subdivision and a stock pond, and thousands of homes here are unaffected. What I would not do is buy without looking: check the Utah Geological Survey mapping for the specific parcel, ask whether a geologic hazard investigation exists, and get a qualified engineer's view on anything visible.
A plan adopted on 11 January 2021 by the State Engineer under section 73-5-15 of the Utah Code, covering Water Right Area 73. It sets safe yield for the basin at 21,000 acre feet a year against current average depletion of about 28,000, and requires average actual depletion to fall by about 7,000 acre feet a year. It does that by regulating water rights according to priority date, in five phases between 2035 and 2080, with the newest rights switched off first.
The first phase takes effect on 1 January 2035 and regulates rights with priority dates through 31 December 1957. The later phases run on 1 January 2050 through 31 December 1954, 1 January 2060 through 31 December 1951, 1 January 2070 through 31 December 1935 and 1 January 2080 through 25 July 1934. The State Engineer can move a phase's regulated date later if recharge or reduced depletion in the preceding decade has already done part of the work.
No. The plan regulates water rights rather than household service, and municipal supply in Enoch runs through the city's system on the city's rights. Where it bites for an individual buyer is on a parcel with its own well or with irrigation rights attached, because those have priority dates and priority date is exactly what the plan regulates by. More broadly it is the reason every city in this valley is now talking about long term supply and about importing water.
Two published documents answer most of this.
A state geological report and a state groundwater plan, both free, both specific, and between them they cover the ground under an Enoch parcel and the water under the whole valley. What they do not do is tell you about your address. That part is a mapping check, a disclosure review and sometimes an engineer, and it belongs before an offer rather than after one.