The cemetery was closed after the devastating storm knocked over more than 200 trees on the property in September 2020.
(Rick Egan | Tribune file photo) Hundreds of tombstones in Salt Lake City Cemetery were damaged in the September 2020 storm. The cemetery reopened to the public on Monday March 24, 2021 after it was closed due to damage sustained during the storm.
After more than eight months, people are finally (officially) allowed to visit relatives and loved ones who are buried in the Salt Lake City cemetery.
The cemetery has been closed since a historic storm hit northern Utah in September 2020. The storm was blowing from Logan to Salt Lake City, and the wind was reaching speeds of up to 99 miles per hour. One person was killed and thousands of homes lost power for several days.
The winds uprooted thousands of trees, including more than 200 in the cemetery, in Salt Lake City alone, causing significant damage.
“Limbs and branches were down all over town, but no place was hit harder than the cemetery,” said Erin Mendenhall, Salt Lake City mayor, in a press release Monday. “As soon as the cemetery staff realized the extent of the damage on September 8th, the site was closed to the public for security reasons to ensure that the hundreds of historic tombstones and other monuments were not further disrupted.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Hundreds of headstones in the Salt Lake City Cemetery were damaged in the recent wind storm on Friday, September 18, 2020.
No burial vaults or caskets were damaged in September, according to a city official, despite massive 100-year-old trees tearing up large chunks of soil and raising gravestones, asphalt, curbs and gutters as they fell.
“It looks like a war,” John Ferrone, an avid hiker who has visited the cemetery regularly for decades, told The Salt Lake Tribune in September. “There’s a lot of damage here, more than anywhere else.”
In a press release, the city announced that all tree stumps and root balls were removed, lawns planted and irrigation repairs completed. Therefore, the officials decided that the cemetery would be safe to open to the public.
The city hired an archaeologist last December to document the storm’s impact on damaged historical artifacts, and hired a conservation company to reposition the tombstones displaced by the storm.
In the press release, the city also confirmed its support for the cities of South Jordan, Spanish Fork, Herriman, Payson and Bluffdale. Summit County; the Utah Department of Natural Resources; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and the Salt Lake City Cemetery Nonprofit Friends.
Mendenhall added that the city will plan a unveiling of the arboretum later this fall, which will include a memorial to longtime cemetery artist Mark Smith, who died in 2019.
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