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Businesses facing uncertainty after Cottonwood Fire, flash floods impact tourism

UT: BUSINESSES STRUGGLE WITH DOUBLE DISASTERS

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    PIUTE COUNTY, Utah (KSTU) — Businesses across Piute, Beaver and Sevier counties are struggling after wildfires and flash flooding hurt tourism during one of the busiest times of the year.

Restaurant, motel and outdoor recreation owners say the back-to-back disasters have kept visitors away and caused major financial problems for small businesses that depend on summer travelers.

Burn scars left by the Cottonwood Fire increased the risk of flash flooding after heavy rain moved through central Utah. Floodwaters carried mud and debris across roads, campgrounds and recreation areas that are popular with tourists.

Dan Groves, owner of Hoovers River Resort in Marysvale, said wildfire smoke caused many visitors to cancel their trips to southern Utah.

“People still were just changing their plans entirely to just not come to Utah,” Groves said. “It sounded like the whole state was on fire.”

Groves said the losses have been especially difficult because tourism businesses in the area have already faced several hard years.

“It was the third summer in a row that we had pretty much the entire summer cancelled and less through traffic for the restaurant,” Groves said. “We were seeing some writing on the wall that was pretty grim.”

Businesses faced another challenge after officials issued a boil-water advisory in parts of Piute County when flood runoff affected local water systems.

At Big Rock Candy Mountain Restaurant, employee Carley Veltri said the fires, flooding and water problems have made it difficult for businesses to recover.

“People convoyed out of here,” Veltri said. “When the fires were happening, now we have flooding. That’s something else.”

Veltri said summer tourism is extremely important for rural Utah communities.

“It’s killing us all,” she said. “Utah is a seasonal state. All the revenue basically comes from the summertime and now since there is no business there is no revenue.”

Groves said many business owners feel overwhelmed by the repeated disasters.

“It’s not because we are bad business owners,” he said. “It’s because we’ve had these natural disasters over and over again.”

Even with the challenges, business owners say they are continuing to stay open and hope visitors return before the summer season is lost completely.

A GoFundMe has been created to help local business owners: Fundraiser by Ahtianna DeJesus : Cottonwood Fire: Support Hoovers and Local Recovery!

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

Watch an orca ram a sunfish so hard that the fish explodes

(CNN) — How hard do you have to ram a fish to make it explode? Ask an orca.Barreling into large, heavy fish with enough force to blast them into instant chum is a previously unknown collaborative feeding strategy among orcas, scientifically called Orcinus orca, also known as killer whales.But in 2024 and 2025, divers captured underwater video of two such events in the Mexican Pacific Ocean and in the Gulf of California. The footage suggests that the brutal body slamming may be in service of a meal — or perhaps a form of play for the orcas, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Ethology.“I filmed the first event several years ago and couldn’t believe what I was witnessing,” said lead study author Kathryn Ayres, a research scientist for the marine conservation nonprofit Beneath the Waves and the first to capture orcas’ high-speed ramming on video.Ayres studies sharks but observing orcas that preyed on sharks in the Gulf of California sparked her interest in killer whale behavior. She filmed the encounter on July 29, 2024, while diving as an ocean safari tour guide with the group Latitude Encounters, near the coast of San José del Cabo in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur.“The cooperative ramming behaviour itself wasn’t entirely new to me, as I had previously observed similar coordinated ramming during a hunt involving a whale shark,” she told CNN in an email.Orcas have also made headlines in recent years for teaming up to ram and sink yachts in waters near Spain and Portugal.“What was unique in this case was the outcome,” Ayres said. “Seeing the sunfish fragment into countless pieces was unlike anything I had encountered before.” Her astonishment was audible as she recorded the ramming episode. “Oh, god!” she repeatedly exclaimed.‘Newly documented behavior’A second video of orcas holding and then ramming a sunfish was filmed by another tour operator in the Gulf of California in September. Both incidents demonstrated teamwork; one orca held a sharptail sunfish, scientifically named Masturus lanceolatus, by its tail, while another orca swam toward the fish at high speed. Moments before impact, the restraining orca let go, and its partner slammed into the sunfish like a freight train hitting a watermelon. Young orcas then gobbled up fish fragments that drifted through the water as their elders tore into what was left of the sunfish’s corpse.Sharptail sunfish, or molas, are among the heaviest fish in the world, weighing more than 4,000 pounds (1,800 kilograms) and measuring up to 10 feet (3 meters) long.Orcas often coordinate their attacks in pairs or groups when they target large prey. However, this torpedolike body slam and subsequent fish explosion had never been observed before and was “an incredible behavior to see,” said Monika Wieland Shields, director of the Orca Behavior Institute. Shields was not involved in the new research.“I have never heard of anything similar to this occurring, so it is indeed a newly documented behavior as far as I know,” Shields told CNN in an email.Though all orcas belong to a single species, their diets vary widely depending on where they live. Orcas’ prey may include fish, seals, belugas, narwhals, baleen whales or porpoises, and can require specialized feeding tactics — including, it seems, high-impact fragmentation.“I think that as we continue to observe orcas more closely around the world,” Shields added, “we will continue to discover novel hunting and feeding behaviors, especially among lesser-studied populations.”‘Just for fun’Ramming the sunfish and causing them to explode could help orca calves and juveniles get more of the remains, according to the study. What’s more, working together strengthens social bonds in orcas, as do shared meals. An exploded sunfish spread out in the water in thousands of pieces is certainly easier to share, offering another possible explanation for this practice.But orcas are also known to play with newly dead food. Some orcas in Puget Sound off Washington state have worn dead salmon as hats. Others drape seal intestines over their fins or take turns tossing sea lion pelts into the air, Shields said.“We’ve also seen interactions with many other objects including bull kelp, driftwood, and crab pots,” she said, “In many of these cases there doesn’t seem to be a functional reason for these behaviors other than play.”In other words, it’s possible that orcas body-slam sunfish purely for entertainment. Ayres noted a large wound on the fish’s body before the impact, which hinted that the orcas feasted on the creature before slamming it to pieces.“They had already consumed the sunfish’s internal organs, which are the most nutrient-rich parts of the prey,” Ayres told CNN in an email. “This suggests that causing the sunfish to explode may not have served an immediate feeding purpose and could have just been for fun.”The sunfish’s flattened body structure is unusual in large fish and could make them more likely to fly apart after a high-speed orca impact compared with other types of fish, Ayres added.“Their bodies are laterally compressed,” she explained. “Once the nutrient-rich internal organs have been removed, the remaining tissues may be more accessible to rupture under high-impact ramming.”But for now, she cautioned, this is only a hypothesis.“We haven’t seen this type of prey fragmentation described in other sunfish species,” she said, “so it’s difficult to know whether it reflects something unique about the anatomy of Masturus lanceolatus, the specific behaviour of these orcas, or a combination of both.”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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