SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) – Happy Monday, Utah! Monsoonal moisture is lingering in the Beehive State today which means more thunderstorms, but not like what we saw over the weekend.

The bottom line? More severe weather and flash flooding on deck today. A brief break from wet weather is around the corner.

The monsoonal flow won’t be as prominent today as high pressure is starting to slide back westward toward us, cutting off the moist air flow. Most of the activity will be focused on the higher terrain, but isolated thunderstorms will still rumble across valleys around the I-15 corridor and the Great Salt Lake Desert in the late afternoon and evening hours. Apart from the isolated thunderstorms, it’ll be a mix of sun and clouds.

Temperatures will warm by a couple of degrees from yesterday which puts us right around average for this time of year. Daytime highs will be in the mid-80s to low 90s for most with upper 70s to low 80s in higher elevations. Salt Lake City and St. George won’t be too far apart temperature-wise with highs of 94 degrees and 98 degrees, respectively.

While the monsoon moisture is tapering off, there is still plenty of energy left in the atmosphere for severe thunderstorms and flash flooding. The Storm Prediction Center has most of northern and central Utah in a “marginal risk” which means some isolated thunderstorms could become severe. The biggest threat will be damaging winds, but we could see large hail in some of these cells as well.

Flash flooding will also be a threat to kick off the workweek for many of the outdoor recreation areas in the south. All of the national and state parks are in the “Possible” flash flood category, except for Grand Staircase/Escalante which is in the “Probable” zone.

If you plan on being in these areas, reschedule if possible. If not, make sure you stay weather-aware because flash floods can occur in places like slot canyons, dry washes, burn scars, and near streams with no warning – even if it isn’t raining where you are.

High pressure takes over tomorrow which will bring mostly sunny to clear skies for most of the state, but some mountainous regions could still have a shower or two roll through. The relief doesn’t last long, wet weather potential starts to slightly uptick on Wednesday when some may see a brief afternoon storm, but Thursday and Friday are when we expect the most thunderstorms.

We’ll keep you up-to-date on the latest developments in our 4Warn Weather forecast both on-air and online, we are Good4Utah!

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SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah woman, on a quest to revive declining Monarch butterfly populations, has become a kind-of “Johnny Appleseed” of the Milkweed plant.

Several years ago, Rachel Taylor was in her Salt Lake City garden and realized something was missing — the Monarch butterflies that filled her childhood in her then-rural Lehi neighborhood.

“We had apple orchards and you know, we played outside and life was really full of bugs and creatures,” Taylor said.

“It (seeing Monarchs) was just…common. You didn’t think twice about it to even notice them,” she said.

The Xerces Society said it’s latest count of Western Monarchs was 233,394, just 5% of what it was in the 1980s. (The vast majority of Monarchs are east of the Rocky Mountains, but that population has dramatically declined, as well. It’s estimated that from 1996 to 2020, the number of Eastern Monarchs dropped from 383 million to just under 45 million.)

Taylor said the problem has been pesticides, development and global warming — things that directly impact the insect as well as the plant — milkweed — that it depends on.

Monarchs lay their eggs on the plant. The caterpillars that hatch eat the milkweed and with it, the toxin inside that becomes the insect’s defense against predators.

That milkweed, though, has been crowded out by development.

“There’s no milkweed growing in ditches around here anymore because there’s no ditches,” Taylor said.

Growing milkweed on her own

So she started growing milkweed in her garden.

“Literally, within 30 days I had a Monarch laying eggs on the plants. That summer I had I counted 70 eggs in my side yard,” she said. “People started asking me for milkweed plants and so I started growing them in the dining room.”

Now, she distributes milkweed seeds and seedlings, encourages people to plant their own Monarch “waystations,” moderates a Facebook group of Monarch watchers and tags butterflies so they can be tracked on their annual migration to Mexico or southern California and back.

“I care so much about the creatures of this Earth and I can’t stop myself from helping and it’s really just coming from the heart,” she said.

You can request free milkweed seeds from Taylor’s website and also read and see more at the Friends of Monarchs Utah Facebook group.

You can contact the butterfly farm mentioned in the TV story by clicking here.

• Whitney Redd filmed a wave of water crashing through her basement window
• It came amid a historic storm on Tuesday night 

By Melissa Koenig For Dailymail.Com

Published: 23:35 BST, 18 August 2024 | Updated: 23:41 BST, 18 August 2024

A Utah family was caught completely off-guard when a huge wall of water crashed through their basement window during a once in 100-year flood event – just two months after they renovated the home.

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Astonishing footage shared online by Whitney Redd shows her sons racing to move a keyboard and other supplies out of a basement office as water stared to leak in from a window on Tuesday night.

She could be hear crying, ‘Oh no,’ as the water started to soak the floor of their Orem home before her husband realizes that their efforts are useless.

‘It’s gonna break,’ he warns, yelling at his family to ‘get back, get back.’

Almost instantly after he warning, a wall of water crashed through the window – sending an office chair flying and forcing Redd to scream in fear.

Astonishing footage shared online shows a wall of water crashing through a family’s basement window on Tuesday night

Whitney Redd said the flood occurred in the basement that her family is using as her in-law’s apartment

She said the flood occurred in the basement of her nearly $850,000 three-bedroom Orem home, which the family uses as an apartment for her in-laws. 

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Redd recounted to KSL-TV how her family ran to check on the in-laws as an evening storm moved quickly through the city of nearly 100,000 people, dumping a massive amount of rain and golf ball-sized hail.

‘So we ran over and noticed, you know, some leaking,’ Redd said of the family’s discovery in the basement.

Her husband then started ‘trying to get into the window, trying to get the hail out, trying to get the rain out, just trying to get things out,’ she said, when he realized it was fruitless. 

‘[My husband is] like “It’s coming down too quick. There’s no way we’re getting all this out. Get out of the room, get out of the room,”‘ she told Fox 13.

At that point, the family moved back – and the water poured in.

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Footage shows Redd’s sons trying to move a keyboard out of the basement office as water started to leak in

The basement was inundated by a foot and a half to two feet of water

Redd would later describe the incident as ‘surreal, just surreal, [with] all that water coming in.

‘We’d recently been to Niagara Falls and it was like that in our home,’ she said. 

The house suffered about a foot and a half to two feet of water but no injuries were reported.

‘Everyone is safe, it’s just a house,’ Redd said. ‘It’s really c****y, but it’s just a house. 

She said her family has since run fans into the basement in an effort to dry it out, and neighbors have helped clear out the apartment – removing the plank flooring and nearly everything else. 

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But unfortunately, the flood came just two months after the Redd family remodeled their basement from a sewage backup.

The Redd family had just renovated the basement apartment of their Orem home two months prior

‘Now they’re back to square one. It’s devastating,’ Redd’s sister wrote in an online fundraiser to help the family with the second round of remodeling expenses. 

It had raised more than $5,000 for the Redd family as of Sunday night, as residents across the city continue to clean up from the freak storm – which dumped 0.75 inches of rain in just 20 minutes on Tuesday.

That is close to the desert city’s monthly average of 0.95 inches, with the city only receiving about 13 inches of rain each year.