The Strawberry High Line Canal was cut around 1916 as part of the Strawberry Valley Project, one of the first federal reclamation schemes in the West. It has been carrying water in the open ever since, and the desert has since filled in around it with subdivisions.
The Central Utah Water Conservancy District has awarded a $750-million contract to a Jacobs and Bowen Collins & Associates joint venture to put the whole thing inside a pipe.
What the job involves
The Strawberry High Line Improvement Project converts an open canal into a pressurized pipeline system sized for a future population of about 420,000 across south Utah County and eastern Juab County. The canal draws from Strawberry Reservoir and the Spanish Fork River and ties into the 49-mile Spanish Fork-Santaquin Pipeline completed in May. It picked up $100 million in U.S. Interior Department funding earlier in 2026.
District senior engineer Brad Perkins describes the existing canal as more than a hundred years old, prone to breaches, and rapidly being surrounded by urban development. All three of those are separate problems and only one of them is about water.
The 200-foot right-of-way is the real asset
The existing canal footprint runs up to 200 feet wide in places. That’s the detail that makes this buildable at a price. A greenfield pipeline of comparable length through developed Utah County would spend years and a large fraction of the budget on acquisition and easements. Here the corridor already exists, already belongs to the district, and can be used for staging, spoil and the pipe itself.
Enclosure is projected to save thousands of acre-feet a year now lost to evaporation and seepage. That’s a district projection, as is the 420,000 population figure, and both come from a party with an interest in the number being large.
What has not been decided
A great deal. The project is in preliminary design. Pipe diameters, materials, staging and sequencing are open. The district expects initial construction and multiple design phases to start within a year, with up to six subprojects under construction inside two years, which implies a program structure rather than a single build.
ENR describes the $750 million as a contract to engineer the project, which leaves genuine ambiguity about whether that figure is design and program management or the total program cost. Anyone bidding downstream packages should confirm which before assuming a construction budget.
Canal enclosure is quietly becoming a category of its own across the arid West, driven by the same three forces converging here: aging federal-era infrastructure, evaporative loss that used to be tolerable, and residential growth pressing against corridors that were rural when they were dug. Utah is doing it at the largest scale so far.