Beaver, Utah: Power, Water and Roads | Ber Wilson

One Town, Every System

Author: Ericson Tua’one, Chief Executive October 21, 2026

Above Beaver, State Route 153 climbs into the canyon beside the Beaver River.

For decades, the road shared that canyon with something most drivers never noticed: the diversions and pipeline that fed Beaver City’s hydroelectric plants. That hydro system generates about one-third of the city’s power.

This summer, floods off the Cottonwood Fire burn scar hit all of it.

“The diversions are gone. The pipeline is gone,” Mayor Matt Robinson told ABC4. Floodwater ripped out about two and a half miles of pipeline along the highway. The power plants were still standing, but full of mud. One of them was a brand-new facility that had been days away from coming online when the fire started.

The road closed. The diversions that carried the river’s water were destroyed. The power plants they fed filled with mud.

One canyon. Three systems.

What the declaration found On October 7, President Trump signed a major disaster declaration for Beaver and Piute counties. A joint damage assessment by FEMA, the state and local governments identified at least $47 million in possible eligible damages.

The July 19 flood wave reached Interstate 15 and closed it for nearly 12 hours. Beaver City Power’s hydroelectric system suffered catastrophic damage to its diversions, pipes and buildings. Culinary and agricultural water sources were damaged and contaminated. Several communities lived under extended boil-water or no-water orders, with drinking water trucked in until systems could be cleared and tested.

The damage did not stay in the mountains. With water systems up the canyons out of service, pumps and groundwater supplies in the valleys were pushed beyond capacity. And with its own generation offline, Beaver has had to buy power, adding to budgets the state described as already strained.

When the declaration came down, State Route 153 was still closed.

Look at that list. Roads, drinking water, irrigation, groundwater and electricity. Every one of them traces back to the same summer of fire and flood.

Planned apart, broken together Here is the market failure this whole series has been circling.

Each system in a small town has its own owner. The state owns the highway. The city owns the water and the power. Farm water often runs through separate irrigation companies. Each one plans, budgets and rebuilds in its own lane.

The ground does not respect those lanes. In a mountain town, the road, the pipeline and the power line often share the same narrow canyon. When that canyon floods, they fail together.

Recovery follows the same lanes. FEMA’s public assistance program reimburses 75 percent of eligible costs to repair or replace damaged public infrastructure. That help matters. But it arrives as reimbursement, after the damage, and the rest still has to be paid by someone.

Mayor Robinson named who that someone is: “The incremental cost to our citizens could be significant, and so it’s a huge priority for Beaver City to be able to assess, redesign and rebuild this hydroelectric infrastructure.”

I want to underline one word. Redesign. A town rebuilding three systems in one canyon has a rare chance to ask whether they should go back the way they were.

I do not know the right answer for Beaver’s hydro system. The engineers and leaders in Beaver are closer to that question than I am. My point is that the question should be asked across all three systems at once.

The risk nobody can see Thirteen days after the declaration, a different kind of risk came into view.

On October 20, legislative auditors released a performance audit of electricity and natural gas cybersecurity. Rocky Mountain Power, which sold about 78 percent of Utah’s electricity in 2023, has mature cybersecurity controls.

Municipal power systems, which sold about 16 percent, were a different story. Auditors surveyed five of Utah’s 38 municipal systems. Incident response planning and third-party assessments were the areas most often needing improvement. As Utah News Dispatch reported, none of the five used independent third-party assessments, and none had developed, documented or regularly practiced incident response plans.

The auditors warned that longer outages could affect hospitals, drinking water, sewage treatment, schools and transportation. They were also fair to the small systems: an attack would generally be limited to one system, and a utility with manual controls at its substations may recover faster.

One line in the report should stop every city council. No state-level entity holds municipalities accountable for following cybersecurity best practices. That responsibility rests with local elected officials.

Beaver City Power is a municipal system. The auditors did not disclose which systems they surveyed, and I am not suggesting Beaver was one of them. But a town that depends on one small utility has to plan for floods and for attacks.

Three tests, one town Ber Wilson’s purpose is to build communities that can stand on their own. Over this series, I have tried to make that phrase practical. It comes down to three tests.

Is a town secure? Do its systems survive the event they were built to face? That question ran through my posts on fire and framing, on invisible threats to the grid and on the flood after the fire.

Is a town self-reliant? Does it control what it depends on? That question ran through the power shutoffs, who pays for the power, the data centers in the desert and the geothermal heat beneath Beaver County.

Is a town thriving? Does the value stay local? That question ran through data centers and their neighbors, and through the crews who will build all of it.

This year, Beaver faced all three tests at once. The floods tested whether its systems were secure. Losing its own hydro generation tested how self-reliant it could be. And as the mayor warned, the cost of rebuilding and buying power could fall hard on the town’s own citizens.

A town does not get to take these tests one at a time. Neither should its plan.

Plan the town as one system Map the shared corridors first. Find every place where a road, a pipeline, a power line and a communication line run side by side, and ask what happens if that corridor floods, burns or is cut.

Rank the services the town cannot lose: drinking water, power for pumps and clinics, a route for repair crews, communications for first responders. Then trace what each one depends on.

Plan rebuilds together. When one system has to be replaced, look at the others in the same corridor before the trench is closed.

Give one team responsibility for the whole picture. Each owner can keep its own budget. Someone still has to hold the plan that connects them.

That is why Ber Wilson works as a design-build contractor. One contract can cover roads and utilities, the buildings on top and the power that runs them, with a single point of responsibility.

Planning will not prevent every failure. But a town that has planned its systems together can recover in a better order, and rebuild in a stronger way.

The Stand-On-Its-Own Test Before the next disaster, I would ask every community leader to answer six questions.

Secure:

Where do the town’s roads, water lines, power lines and communications share a corridor, and what happens if it fails?

Has the city council been briefed on the local utility’s incident response plan, including for a cyberattack?

Self-reliant:

Which services must stay on, and what does each one depend on?

If the town’s own power or water source goes down, how long can it operate, and what does the alternative cost?

Thriving:

When one system is rebuilt, who checks the others in the same corridor?

Who holds the plan that connects all of them, and will local crews help build it?

Beaver did not choose to become the example, and it is rebuilding with limited resources.

The lesson belongs to every town: a community is one system. It has to be planned like one.

In my next post, I will look at what happens when a county writes its rules before the next large project arrives.

Take the Stand-On-Its-Own Test with us If you lead a city, county or utility in rural Utah, ask Ber Wilson for a Stand-On-Its-Own Test workshop.

Bring your maps of roads, water, power and communications, recent damage reports and the projects already on your list. We will work through all three tests with your team and show you where one coordinated plan could save money and time in the next rebuild.

The workshop does not replace engineering studies. It helps you decide which ones to do first.

Tell us about your town through our project form. Someone who works on this kind of project will get back to you within one business day.

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