SALT LAKE CITY: A wall of water swept away two vehicles carrying women and children in a western town, killing at least eight people and leaving five others missing in a community that served as a home base for polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs, authorities said.

Three people survived as the flash flooding washed the vehicles several hundred yards (meters) downstream about 5 pm on Monday, Hildale assistant fire chief Kevin Barlow said. The Washington County Emergency Services Department said on Tuesday that rescue crews were still searching for the five missing along the Utah-Arizona border. The flood “obviously caught these people off guard”, Barlow said. “Witnesses say they were backing out of it trying to get away from it and it still swept them in.”

Officials say the bodies of two people were recovered in Arizona a few miles (kilometers) downstream, while the bodies of six others were recovered in Utah.

The floods came after heavy rains fell in the canyons just north of the sister towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, sending waves of water barreling through the streets. The towns sit at the foot of picturesque red rock cliffs south of Salt Lake City.

The community is a patchwork of upscale, elegant residences surrounded by large walls and unfinished, dilapidated houses that remain just as they were in the early 2000s, when Jeffs ordered that all construction stop in Utah to focus on building his compound in Texas.

More than four years after Jeffs was sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting underage girls he considered brides, the community is split between loyalists who still believe Jeffs is a victim of religious persecution and defectors who are embracing government efforts to pull the town into modern society.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2015

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