Central Utah Water highlights Olmsted power plant's historic architecture while defending new plant built to protect water rights

Jansen Cook, Preservation Architect with the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, led a recorded tour of the Olmsted Power Plant campus and described the plant's early-20th-century construction, its machinery, and the reasons Central Utah Water Conservancy District built a modern replacement plant.

Cook said the historic plant was built of ashlar masonry, a fired-clay masonry chosen in part for fire resistance, and that large windows historically provided daylight for workers before electric lighting was commonplace. "It was built of Ashlar Masonry," Cook said, "and the reason for that is that it was fire resistant." He described the site as a run-of-river plant that diverts water about 4.5 miles up Provo Canyon rather than siting at a dam base.

The tour traced the plant's water routing: water stored at Bridal Lake (around 10,000 feet) supplies spring runoff…