Weather Archives - The Colorado Sun https://coloradosun.com/category/news/weather/ Telling stories that matter in a dynamic, evolving state. Wed, 10 Jul 2024 15:59:40 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://newspack-coloradosun.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/cropped-cropped-colorado_full_sun_yellow_with_background-150x150.webp Weather Archives - The Colorado Sun https://coloradosun.com/category/news/weather/ 32 32 210193391 The Colorado Sun discusses insurance costs, climate change and weather events https://coloradosun.com/2024/07/10/the-colorado-sun-discusses-insurance-costs-climate-change/ Wed, 10 Jul 2024 15:34:47 +0000 https://coloradosun.com/?p=393237 The Colorado Sun's environmental reporter Michael Booth spoke with a panel of experts about how wildfires, hail, floods and more are costing Coloradans billions in higher insurance rates.]]>

The Colorado Sun’s environmental reporter Michael Booth spoke with a panel of experts about how wildfires, hail, floods and more are costing Coloradans billions in higher insurance rates. And that’s if they can get insured at all. It will only get worse as a warming planet creates more disasters. How bad will it get, and what can state policymakers do about it?

Speakers included:

  • Insurance Commissioner Michael Conway
  • Executive Director Carole Walker, Rocky Mountain Insurance Information
  • Director of Insurance Douglas Heller, Consumer Federation of America
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Pueblo County residents evacuated as wildfire sparked by lightning continues to creep in steep terrain outside Beulah https://coloradosun.com/2024/06/25/wildfire-pueblo-county-beulah/ Tue, 25 Jun 2024 15:11:03 +0000 https://coloradosun.com/?p=391644 While the fire near Beulah grows, the Interlaken Fire near Twin Lakes is now 100% contained after burning nearly 700 acres ]]>

A fire sparked by lightning near Beulah in southwestern Pueblo County has nearly tripled in size since Monday evening to 787 acres.

Video collected by the state Multi-Mission Aircraft flight over the Oak Ridge fire showed the fire burning with greatest intensity along the western edge of the fire, which was 0% contained as of 8:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Fire crews will remain on scene this evening and will continue to monitor the fire overnight.

Tuesday afternoon, the fire was at about 495 acres as local authorities ordered nearby residents to evacuate. 

The fire, spotted Saturday morning as a single tree burning near Beulah Highlands, expanded in the first three days to 275 acres by Monday evening and is fueled by strong winds. 

The Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office ordered a mandatory evacuation Monday for Middle Creek Canyon and has ordered pre-evacuation notices for residents of Cascade Avenue, Vine Mesa Avenue, Pine Avenue and Beulah Highlands. Displaced residents have been directed to shelter at Pueblo County Parks and Recreation in Pueblo. 

A community team, meanwhile, has set up a shelter for livestock and offered to help people trailer horses and other large animals to 4 Bar S, a church along Colorado 78.

Various agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, were fighting the fire, about 3 miles northwest of Beulah, with five air tankers and helicopters. Additional air and ground resources were expected to arrive Tuesday.

The fire was first noticed around 9 a.m. Saturday, when the Beulah Fire Protection and Ambulance District reported that fire crews were headed to the national forest to investigate smoke that was spotted by Beulah Highlands residents. 

Flames erupt from the Oak Ridge wildfire near Beulah. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

“The fire is confirmed to be a single, downed tree burning,” the district reported at 9:40 a.m. “Air resources will be overhead throughout the day to extinguish. There are no concerns for the public at this time. The fire is about two ridges away from the Beulah Highlands.”

Aerial crews dropped buckets of water on the fire Saturday afternoon, but the blaze continued “creeping and smoldering in steep terrain.”

The Oak Ridge fire started in Pueblo County on June 22, 2024. As of June 25, the fire had burned 275 acres with 0% containment. (U.S. Forest Service)

It is one of a handful of fires burning in Colorado

The Interlaken fire burning southwest of Leadville near Twin Lakes was considered 100% contained Monday night, officials said. The size of the burn area was downsized over the weekend to 704 acres from, 745 acres after more precise mapping.

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Colorado has the third-most lightning deaths in the country. Here’s how to stay safe. https://coloradosun.com/2024/05/30/colorado-lightning-deaths/ Thu, 30 May 2024 10:13:00 +0000 https://coloradosun.com/?p=388356 Gif of a lightning strikeThe fatal strike Saturday that killed a cattle rancher outside of Rand in northern Colorado was the 25th lightning death in Colorado since 2006]]> Gif of a lightning strike

A thunderstorm that turned roads into rivers and basements into swimming pools lit up the sky over Greeley on Tuesday night with flashes of light as bright as daytime. Three days earlier, a single lightning strike killed a Jackson County rancher and more than 30 of his cattle. Last week, a storm that raged over Yuma, rumbling like a freight train, buried the plains town in knee-deep hail.

It’s been an intense week, even for Colorado in the spring. 

The state, known for its wild electrical storms that seem to come out of nowhere, is third-highest in the nation for lightning deaths. The fatal strike Saturday that killed a cattle rancher outside of Rand in northern Colorado was the 25th lightning death in Colorado since 2006, according to data provided by the National Weather Service in Boulder. 

That’s more fatal lightning strikes than all but two other states — Florida, which had 88 during that time period, and Texas, with 39. 

“Lightning strikes aren’t necessarily rare,” said Jennifer Stark, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Boulder. “We get a lot of lightning in Colorado and Colorado is one of the top states for fatalities.”

The death of Colorado rancher Mike Morgan was the first lightning fatality in Colorado since 2020, when a woman was struck while walking her dog in Durango. It was also the first known lightning fatality in the nation in 2024, according to the National Weather Service. By this time in the spring, the United States averages three lightning deaths, based on data from the past decade. 

Morgan, 51, was standing on a trailer tossing hay to cows when he was struck. The electricity that killed him also knocked 100 cows and calves off their feet, and at least 32 of them did not get back up, according to the coroner in Jackson County. 

His death was the third fatal lightning strike among ranchers or farmers in Colorado since 2006. The other deaths included a 23-year-old man who was riding a mule near Creede in 2008 and a 26-year-old man who was repairing a barbed wire fence near Walden in 2006, according to the Lightning Safety Council

Farming and ranching rank fifth on the list of most dangerous activities when it comes to lightning, behind fishing, going to the beach, boating and camping.

Stark said the lightning that killed Morgan and his cattle likely traveled from the trailer he was standing on and through the ground. “That’s a huge amount of electricity hitting an object,” she said. “That electricity travels. It’s not just absorbed. If you are with a group of people, you don’t have to be struck directly. It can strike an object near you and it can strike the ground.” 

How to protect yourself from lightning

If you’re in a lake when a thunderstorm approaches, get out. If you’re outside, get to a vehicle or a four-sided shelter. And if you’re on a hike with no shelter in sight, crouch into a ball, but do not lie on the ground. 

Of the 25 people who died from lightning strikes in Colorado in the past 18 years, two were camping, three were hiking and four were running or walking. 

“Don’t stand under a tree,” Stark said. Also, don’t stand out in the open and become the tallest object in the area, she said. 

“Crouch down on the balls of your feet, with as little contact with the ground as possible and as low as you can get. But you don’t want to lie on the ground.” 

The best option is to find a four-sided shelter, but “if you’re on top of a mountain above treeline, that might not be feasible,” Stark said. Picnic shelters, baseball dugouts or any shelter that doesn’t have four sides is not good enough, she said. 

If you’re at home during a thunderstorm, don’t take a shower (electricity can travel through the pipes) and don’t stand near the windows, she said.

Lightning strikes above the Denver city skyline
A bolt of lightning illuminates the sky over downtown as a summer storm rolls over Denver July 30, 2021. (David Zalubowski, AP Photo)
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One person killed in storm that flooded homes, stranded cars, damaged stores in Greeley https://coloradosun.com/2024/05/29/greeley-storm-flooding-hail-death/ Thu, 30 May 2024 01:03:28 +0000 https://coloradosun.com/?p=388382 Many residents said they had to shovel drifts of heavy hail that was holding water in their yards and businesses]]>

GREELEY — Dezarae Wolf saved from the money she earns as a rural mail carrier for four years and in November, she was finally able to buy a simple downtown Greeley house for her and her son, Logan. 

When she went to the basement Wednesday morning to feed her dog, she found herself neck-deep in water.

Wolf, 28, sent Logan, now 9, to the Boys and Girls Club and scrapped her canned goods, dried out her records and mourned her treasured antique furniture, including her favorite, a 1950s-era sofa.

“I’m devastated,” Wolf said. 

One person was killed and another was seriously injured during the storm that ripped through Greeley late Tuesday night, city officials said Wednesday. During the heaviest period of hail and rain, crews from Greeley, Platte Valley, Evans and Windsor rescued 10 people. Some were pulled from stranded cars, others had to be helped from their flooded basement apartments through windows, a spokeswoman said. Most of the rescues took place in east Greeley.

Plumber and landscaper Rudy Alarcon assists Dezarae Wolf in pumping water out of her basement after it was flooded with multiple feet of water. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

Some downtown business owners reported significant damage. A few east Greeley neighborhoods were flooded as their roads turned into rivers. 

Sixteenth Street, a major east-west route through Greeley, was closed in both directions from U.S. 85 to Sixth Avenue (the block that seemed to take the worst damage) in downtown Greeley. 

City crews worked through the night and Wednesday morning to clear streets of piles of hail and shredded tree branches and closed a some city buildings, including the former senior center, now called the Active Adult Center, and opened a temporary shelter at the Family FunPlex, which was occupied by four people and two dogs as of Wednesday afternoon. Residents can report damage here and keep up to date on the storm and road closures here.

Wolf knew the storm was memorable, but as she watched the constant lightning flash through the sky like a strobe light and the hail pile up, she wasn’t too worried and fell asleep as the thunder died to a whisper. Wednesday morning, after she discovered her basement resembled a swimming pool, she went outside to find her yard full of solid chunks of hail the size of small boulders.

She thinks a wall of water crashed through her back yard and into her block and basement overnight. It’s possible that the heavy hail, enough for many residents to report that they shoveled it like snow to allow water to run from their yards, acted as a dam until it broke, sending the water rushing toward her home and other houses near the intersection of 16th Street and Sixth Avenue. 

Chunks of hail remain in a neighborhood of eastern Greeley May 29, 2024, the day after severe thunderstorms swept the area. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

Wolf said she used to watch flash floods as a kid living in Fort Lupton next to the South Platte River, and her family’s barn flooded every year. This was worse, she said.

In the next block over, Sarah Vasquez, 51, swept mud and branches from her walk Wednesday afternoon. The storm the night before, she said as she swept, kept her and husband under a gas station canopy for an hour as they returned from a softball game. They barely made it back home as the water on her block nearly covered her tires. This morning they found their basement flooded. 

“Thank God it was just that,” Vasquez said. 

As I was sweeping water out of the store, I just kept saying, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK.’ But I didn’t know if it was OK. 

— Marie Flores, downtown Greeley business owner

Some basement renters bore the brunt of the storm a few blocks away. David Bernot, a graduate student at the University of Northern Colorado, found water nearly up to his bed when he returned home to his basement apartment. The trip home took a while: At one point, he dove in the back seat because the hail was so bad he thought his windshield would shatter. He decided to spend the night at his parents’ Greeley home. 

Wednesday morning he was packing for an unexpected move. The floors in his apartment are ruined and he isn’t sure it’s safe to live there now. But his Pokemon collection and saxophones were safe. Some sheet music was drenched.

David Bernot, a graduate student in jazz studies at the University of Northern Colorado, saw inches of water flood his basement unit on the night of May 28, 2024, due to the severe hail and thunderstorms in Greeley. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

“I haven’t started plugging in some electronics,” Bernot said, “to see if they still work.” 

Businesses mostly just got wet, but some in the heart of downtown were flooded. Marie Flores said at one point a river was rushing through her store. Her husband, Miguel, got drenched and cold trying to shovel piles of hail outside to keep the water moving.

“As I was sweeping water out of the store, I just kept saying, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK,’” Marie said. “But I didn’t know if it was OK.” 

The two were nearly done renovating their makeup store, called Girl Talk, into a dessert shop that will sell root beer floats, ice cream and other sweets. It will be called Sweet Talk Shoppe. Her neighbors, including Mom’s Popcorn and The Strange and Unusual, an oddities store, also had significant flooding and were closed for the day. 

Marie Flores cleans the flooded basement interiors of Sweet Talk Shoppe, a dessert shop in downtown Greeley that was scheduled to open in the coming weeks. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

The Floreses now aren’t sure when the new store will open. Marie said it may take a few weeks to recover. Still, she has high hopes for their new concept. 

“Food is always good,” Marie said. “When you’re happy, you eat, and when you’re sad, you eat too.” 

She paused and sighed.

“We should go eat now,” she said. 

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Knee-deep hail in small Colorado town calls for heavy equipment, snow shovels to clear https://coloradosun.com/2024/05/21/yuma-hailstorm-colorado-2024/ Tue, 21 May 2024 23:00:39 +0000 https://coloradosun.com/?p=387337 The storm hit Yuma as torrential rain, high winds and large hail pummeled neighboring states as a new round of storms threatened more of the Midwest on Tuesday]]>

Residents in a small city in northeastern Colorado were cleaning up Tuesday after hail the size of baseballs and golf balls pounded the community, with heavy construction equipment and snow shovels used to clear ice that piled up knee-deep the night before.

Monday night’s storm in Yuma shattered vehicle windshields, pounded the siding off buildings and broke many windows. lt also brought heavy rain to the city of about 3,500 people about 40 miles west of Nebraska. No injuries were reported, a city spokerson, Angie Cordell, said.

The storm hit as torrential rain, high winds and large hail pummeled neighboring states as a new round of storms threatened more of the Midwest on Tuesday.

Schools were closed in Yuma on Tuesday as the cleanup continued. Residents also were clearing fallen tree branches and leaves knocked down by the storm and bringing them to a drop-off spot designated by the city, Cordell said. The city’s front-end loader was used to remove the hail, she said.

The hail was still about a half-foot deep on Tuesday morning, said Curtis Glenn, a trustee at Yuma Methodist Church, which had flooding and hail damage.

This image provided by JJ Unger, shows hail surrounding a vehicle, Monday night, May 20, 2024, in Yuma, Colo. Residents in the small city in northeastern Colorado were cleaning up Tuesday after hail the size of baseballs and golf balls pounded the community, with heavy construction equipment and snow shovels being used to clear hail that had piled up knee-deep the night before. (JJ Unger via AP)

On Monday night, hailstones piled up in doorways, making it impossible to open them and creating dams that pushed rainwater into buildings, he said.

Stained glass windows on the west side of the church, in the direct path of the storm, were shattered, allowing rain inside, and dammed stormwater was also forced into the building, Glenn said. Church members worked to move the altar, Bibles and hymnals away from the broken windows to a safer spot, he said.

Glenn, an insurance claims adjuster, was alerted to rain and water entering the church shortly after he managed to drive his family from his daughter’s dance recital in the nearby town of Eckley despite a shattered windshield and hail dents “big enough to put a fist in.”

Glenn said the combined sounds of the hail, rain and wind sounded like “a gun going off while you’re on a train.”

“It’s not something you ever want to see or ever want to see again,” he said of the storm, the worst he has seen in his years working in the insurance industry.

There were at least two reports of hail up to 4 inches in diameter, the size of softballs, near Yuma and the nearby town of Akron, according to the National Weather Service. Most of the hail reported in the area ranged from egg-sized to baseball and golf ball-sized stones.

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Independence Pass, Trail Ridge will remain closed over Memorial Day weekend due to heavy snow https://coloradosun.com/2024/05/21/independence-pass-opening-trail-ridge-colorado/ Tue, 21 May 2024 17:35:22 +0000 https://coloradosun.com/?p=387291 An avalanche falls over a road.Snow also has delayed opening of Mount Blue Sky Road and Guanella Pass]]> An avalanche falls over a road.

Memorial Day travelers hoping for a long, scenic drive through the Rockies may have to re-route their plans. 

Independence Pass, the popular highway that connects Aspen to Twin Lakes and passes beneath four fourteeners, will remain closed through Memorial Day weekend. Its anticipated opening date has been pushed back to June 1. 

The pass typically closes on Nov. 7 and “almost always” opens the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, according to the Colorado Department of Transportation’s website. The highway closed a week early this past winter in anticipation of a storm. The last time Colorado 82 wasn’t open by Memorial Day was in 2020, after several counties requested it stay closed to limit travel during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pass, which tops out at 12,095 feet, is closed between Tagert Lake Road (5 miles east of Aspen) and Carlton Tunnel Road (13 miles west of Twin Lakes).

The pass received 36 inches of snow from May 9-12, delaying the avalanche mitigation required before clearing crews can work on the road, CDOT spokesperson Elise Thatcher said. On May 14 avalanche crews “turkey bombed” the pass, dropping more than 50 bombs shaped like Thanksgiving turkeys onto thick cornices that formed above the road.

The next phase of maintenance can include removing rocks, rebuilding guardrails and filling cracks created during freeze-thaw cycles.

Independence Pass is a quintessential scenic byway, climbing from the lush, cool evergreens of a montane ecosystem, passing through the subalpine and peaking in the windblown tundra of Colorado alpine. The pass also crosses three federally designated wilderness areas — Hunter-Fryingpan, Collegiate Peaks and Mount Massive — and has several campgrounds and trailheads. The campgrounds on the east side of the pass, including Parry Peak, Twin Peaks and Twin Lakes, are also typically open to the public by Memorial Day weekend, according to the Independence Pass Foundation. West-side campgrounds don’t open until June. 

Over the past three years, CDOT tracked around 1,400 cars traveling over the pass daily.

Other popular mountain passes are also closed at the time of writing, including Guanella Pass, which climbs from Georgetown to a summit near the base of Mount Bierstadt, and Trail Ridge Road, which winds through Rocky Mountain National Park and tops out at 12,183 feet.

Rocky Mountain National Park spokesperson Kyle Patterson on Wednesday morning said workers have been attempting to clear snow from the highest continuous paved road in the U.S. since mid-April. “Due to ongoing and forecasted winter weather conditions at higher elevations in Rocky Mountain National Park, Trail Ridge Road will not be opening this holiday weekend,” she said in an email.

“May storms with significant winds at higher elevations have hampered snow plowing operations,” she wrote. “Plow operators this week have encountered additional snow accumulation, significant wind resulting in deep snow drifts, freezing cold temperatures and ice.” 

Colorado 5 to the 14,130-foot summit of Mount Blue Sky is also closed, but is slated to open on Monday, May 27. 

A yellow snow plow moving through deep snow on Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park
Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park is often open in time for Memorial Day weekend, but heavy spring storms, including on May 21, 2024, stalled the work. (Contributed)
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Does Colorado get 300 days of sunshine per year? https://coloradosun.com/2024/05/06/300-days-of-sunshine-colorado/ Mon, 06 May 2024 10:02:00 +0000 https://coloradosun.com/?p=383904 Graphic of a man and woman gardening with a sun high in the skyThe Sun partners with Gigafact to fact-check viral claims]]> Graphic of a man and woman gardening with a sun high in the sky

While Colorado sees sunny skies for more than two-thirds of the year, the state falls short of 300 days of sunshine. 

In 2020 the Denver area had 115 days where the sky cover was considered fair, 208 partly cloudy days and 43 cloudy days, according to a 2020 National Weather Service annual climate summary.

The National Climatic Data Center ranked U.S. cities based on annual possible sunshine through 2004 using several years of data. Using 46 years of climate data, the center found that Denver ranked 30th with the sun shining 69% of days every year — or about 252 days. Two Colorado cities ranked higher but did not break the 300 day mark, either.

In Pueblo, 76% of days were sunny while Grand Junction boasted 71% of days with sunshine.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

See full source list below.

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Preemptive power outage caused chaos in Boulder County during wind storm, Xcel customers testify https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/18/xcel-wind-storm-shut-down-wildfire-boulder-county/ Thu, 18 Apr 2024 16:34:28 +0000 https://coloradosun.com/?p=380644 Aerial view of powerlines next to a road and a cluster of buildingsTestimony to Colorado Public Utilities Commission points to lack of communication by Xcel in the hours before powerlines were powered down as a hedge against wildfire]]> Aerial view of powerlines next to a road and a cluster of buildings

Xcel Energy’s “public safety outage,” which began April 6, left people bundled up in chilly homes, jails and emergency services in the dark, restaurants scrambling to save perishable ingredients, a pharmaceutical-maker losing millions of dollars and a whole lot of chaos and confusion.

That is the picture that emerged from testimony Wednesday at a Colorado Public Utilities Commission hearing on the decision by Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electricity provider, to shut down part of its grid to reduce wildfire risk in the face of high winds.

At Gov. Jared Polis’ direction, the PUC has opened an investigation into Xcel Energy’s decision and its execution of powering down the lines serving 55,000 people, including the city of Boulder, from April 6 through April 7.

“It’s clear there were some real difficult repercussions from the weekend,” PUC Commissioner Megan Gilman said. “It is clear we had some potentially catastrophic near misses.”

More than 160 people signed up to testify and while the majority were from Boulder County, people from Douglas, Arapahoe and Larimer counties and Denver also addressed the commission.

“The next steps forward to make things better is to understand what happened,” PUC Chairman Eric Blank told the meeting. “We can’t do that without your experiences.”

Xcel Energy, in a statement, said: “We acknowledge there are ways to improve executing these safety measures in the future and are listening closely to what our customers are sharing with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.”

The company is facing nearly 300 lawsuits from homeowners, local governments and Target in connection with the Marshall fire, on Dec. 30, 2021, which killed two people and destroyed 1,084 homes along  with commercial properties for more than $2 billion in total property damage.

An official investigation, by the Boulder County Sheriff and the district attorney’s office, concluded that an Xcel Energy wire blown loose by high winds was one source of the fire. The utility disputes the findings.

In February, a fallen Xcel Energy powerline in Texas set off the record-setting Smokehouse Creek Fire, which burned more than 1.2 million acres in the state’s Panhandle

One pervasive complaint voiced at the PUC hearing was that for a planned event, local agencies and governments and residential and business customers received little warning.

“We only had five hours to prepare,” Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett said. The loss of electricity impacted the emergency operations center, the jail, the homeless shelter, the drinking water treatment plant, which had to run on auxiliary power for three days, and several fire stations.

The wastewater treatment plant lost power, creating the risk of raw sewage spilling into Boulder Creek and prompting emergency calls to the utility. “There was less than 10 minutes to spare when the power was turned back on,” Brockett said.

We only had five hours to prepare.

— Aaron Brockett, Boulder mayor

Businesses got even less notice. Agilent Technologies, which has a Boulder facility making pharmaceuticals, got a recorded phone call Saturday, two-and-a-half hours before the shutdown. “It will result in product loss of several million dollars,” Lorri Brovsky, the company director of facilities, environmental, health and safety, told the commission.

“We never did receive any updates on when the power would be restored,” Brovsky said. The power was restored after 26 hours.

Hosea Rosenberg, owner of Blackbelly Market and Restaurant in Boulder, said he got a text from Xcel Energy 30 minutes after the power went out.

There was $50,000 to $60,000 of food inventory in the restaurant, Rosenberg said. “We were lucky enough to borrow a refrigerator truck and save most of our food.”

There was also much confusion as to who was blacked out and who wasn’t and who was purposely cut and those who were out because of actual weather-related outages. About 100,000 people lost power  in because of the storm.

Bettina Swigger, CEO of the Downtown Boulder Partnership, called the communications “chaotic” and pointed out that while the power was out at the east end of the city’s busy pedestrian zone, it was on along the west end.

“One side of the Pearl Street Mall was dark and the other was not,” Swigger said.

An initial partnership survey put downtown business losses at about $1.3 million with $242,000 in lost wages for workers.

“We recognize that being without this essential service brings challenges to our customers and using a public safety power shutoff is a last resort,” the Xcel statement said. “We stand by our decision to protect the public from wildfire risk and firmly believe our actions contributed to preventing a wildfire during the most recent extreme wind event.”

Amy Petre Hill, assistant director of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, and Nick Torres, advocacy director for the American Lung Association, voiced concerns about inadequate planning for at-risk communities.

Two of Hill’s friends, one with a spinal injury and another with ALS disease, survived the outage on backup batteries, she said.

If public safety outages become more frequent, posing challenges to those on supplemental oxygen and oxygen concentrators, Torres said, outreach to this community should be a priority. During the outage, he said, some people were forced to go to hospital emergency rooms for oxygen.

The Fullen household passed the outage in the chilly dark, George Fullen recounted in written testimony, one of about 700 comments filed with the PUC.

“During this 24-hour period, we gradually put on more clothes as the house cooled,” Fullen said. “When it started getting dark, we rounded up all of our flashlights and lanterns, and had a cold supper. Good that my wife did not need her oxygen.”

When the power did come back on it blew out two appliances in Scott Glick’s home in Larimer County.

“I’m a Marshall fire survivor,” Eileen Berry told the commission. “ I understand having had my house completely burned down, possibly by Xcel power lines, why they chose to shut off the power.”

“Perhaps this is the new normal,” Berry said. “However, I do think there needs to be much better notice.

The PUC’s Blank said that Xcel Energy will be submitting an updated wildfire mitigation plan in the coming weeks or months with a power shutoff program that sets in place rules and other guardrails surrounding planned outages.

Perhaps this is the new normal.

— Eileen Berry, Marshall fire survivor

While all this turmoil swept across the region, Paul Culnan, a south Boulder resident, told the commission he was “blissfully unaware of what was going on.”  

Culnan’s home is outfitted with photovoltaic solar panels, solar thermal heating and hot water and he has a backup battery. “My home was fine other than shaking in the wind,” he said.

The bliss was reenforced by the fact it was two days before Culnan got a text about the outage.

“Xcel’s got a lot of smart people,” Culnan said. “It is inconceivable they could bungle this bad just by accident. It is hard to imagine.”

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Boulder County: Xcel gave inadequate notice before outages left 55,000 without power https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/09/xcel-preplanned-power-outage/ Tue, 09 Apr 2024 21:44:49 +0000 https://coloradosun.com/?p=379513 The power company stands by its handling of the pre-planned outage after weekend shut-off had residents and disaster agencies scrambling ]]>

Xcel Energy gave inadequate notice to the Boulder County Office of Disaster Management of a massive pre-planned power outage over the weekend that shut down electricity to more than 55,000 customers along the Front Range, the agency said Tuesday — and power still hadn’t been restored to an estimated 6,000 customers more than two days later.

The county said short notice and a lack of details hampered its ability to get word of the outage to vulnerable groups and to gauge emergency needs as power went out around 3 p.m. Saturday.

“There were profound impacts,” said Sarah Huntley, spokesperson for the Boulder County Office of Disaster Management. “So we were scrambling to try to meet those needs.” 

The utility decided it might cut power after the National Weather Service at 5 p.m. Friday forecasted wind gusts of up to 100 mph along the foothills Saturday into Sunday and sustained winds of up to 55 mph along the Interstate 25 corridor. The winds, coupled with relatively low humidity, prompted the Boulder office of the service Friday evening to issue a red flag warning starting at noon Saturday and going until 6 p.m. Sunday for parts of Boulder, Larimer and Weld counties. 

But Huntley said the state’s largest utility did not let emergency response officials know about the shutdown until 7 p.m. Friday. 

Once Xcel notified the county, office leadership “was trying very hard to get more details to understand which parts of the system they were going to shut down and which parts of the county and city were going to be impacted,” Huntley said, “but the office was not able to get a lot of detail.” 

The next time the office heard from Xcel was at 10 a.m. Saturday, when Xcel said they were going to start the preventive outages at 3 p.m. that afternoon, Huntley said.  

“But again they could not provide us at that point with maps or details about which parts of our community would be impacted,” she added. 

Saturday marked the first time the utility has cut power ahead of high winds as a preventive measure. In the past, power has remained on through windy days, with the utility responding to any outages that occur.

On Tuesday, an Xcel spokesperson defended the utility’s handling of the shut-off, saying it was working on becoming “more confident and comfortable with the decisions to turn power off” before dangerous weather. 

The utility wasn’t certain that a shut-off would actually be necessary Friday night, because of the chance that “winds might subside” and humidity rise by Saturday morning, said Hollie Velasquez Horvath, an Xcel spokesperson. When conditions worsened instead, affecting 55,000 residents instead of the original 25,000 Xcel suspected, they made the call to shut off power. 

The move comes more than two years after an Xcel powerline was blamed for helping ignite the wind-driven Marshall fire that destroyed more than 1,000 homes and killed two people in Boulder County. High wind caused a power line to disconnect from its mooring and touch other lines, causing sparks to shower onto dry grass, investigators found. Velasquez Horvath said Tuesday the utility denies it was responsible for causing the Marshall fire.

More than 150 insurance companies and two survivors of the deadly fire are suing Xcel Energy for the utility company’s role in starting the December 2021 fire, Colorado’s costliest and most destructive in history.

Areas surrounding the Davidson ditch are seen from Marshall and Cherryvale Road, Aug. 15, 2023, south of Boulder.
Areas surrounding the Davidson ditch are seen from Marshall and Cherryvale Road, Aug. 15, 2023, south of Boulder. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

Boulder County’s Office of Disaster Management is responsible for limiting the impacts of disasters on humans, property, environment and infrastructure through community preparedness, mitigation of hazards, effective disaster response and recovery. Alerts on the agency’s website and social media platforms are the primary method of getting the word out, Huntley said. 

But without power or cell service, which became spotty during the windstorm, Huntley said the office didn’t know whom it was reaching. “We were trying to get the information out, but these are all electronic methods of communication,” she said. So they called on members of the community to convey information and “more importantly, to hear back from people about what was going on and what they needed.”   

The impacts of the outage were far-reaching. 

In Nederland, residents were in town buying food and supplies at 2 p.m. Saturday, after hearing that the outage would begin at 2:30. But the lights went out at the Mountain People’s Food Co-op 15 minutes before Xcel stated they would. With no way to pay, customers left without buying their candles, boxes of tea, canned goods and vegetables. 

On the Facebook group Nedheads, residents listed a litany of other hardships they endured over the weekend. 

Jennie Doerr McLaughlin, who lives on Ridge Road outside of town, wrote in a message to The Colorado Sun she’d been without power for three full days on Monday, despite the weather being “beautiful.” 

McLaughlin’s family gets their water from a well, “so when the power goes out, no water,” she said. “We don’t have cell service, so we rely on wifi for connectivity. No power = no internet/phone. We do have a landline but it was dead the last two days because, we heard, backup batteries died in the phone boxes because there was no power. And we will lose everything in our fridge and two freezers,” which could cost the family hundreds of dollars. 

We were trying to get the information out, but these are all electronic methods of communication.

— Sarah Huntley, spokesperson for the Boulder County Office of Disaster Management

Scot Gorbet, another Nedheads member who works at an undisclosed hospital in Boulder, said people came to the ER because without electricity their medical devices wouldn’t work, “including oxygen concentrators, which could have had very serious outcomes.” 

“So I guess my question would be did (Xcel) not think through every situation before just cutting power?” Gorbet asked. “It didn’t seem like there was an emergency process in place. And Boulder County Public Health didn’t seem to do any outreach.” 

The Boulder County jail lost power for a short while, said Vincent Montez, a commander at the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. That could have been bad had backup systems not been in place, “because the jail is basically a city inside of the county,” and security could have been compromised, he said. 

And “mountain schools” without power in Nederland, Jamestown and Gold Hill were forced to close Monday, something McLaughlin calls unacceptable. “There are so few days in the school year and this hurts kids getting ready for graduation, CMAS testing, SAT testing, etc,” she wrote to The Sun.  

On Tuesday morning, the Boulder County commissioners questioned the extent of the outages, and called on Xcel leadership to explain. 

“Two or three days without power may create serious financial hardship and impacts to the health and wellbeing of our community,” the commissioners said in a joint statement, which called high winds in the foothills a common occurrence. “These disruptions do not impact everyone equally.” 

The statement said commissioners and elected representatives from Boulder County communities met with Xcel leaders Monday to get more insight into the decision, and that the utility promised better communication in the future. 

Xcel told the commissioners that proactive power outages are a small but crucial part of their emerging wildfire mitigation strategy, used in extraordinary circumstances and not for every flag warning. They warned other preventive shut-offs could come in the future. 

But Velasquez Horvath told The Sun the utility will do everything it can to mitigate preventive power outages, through things like training staff meteorologists to recognize the risks of wildfire conditions, building up a workforce that can do outreach to communities long before and in immediate advance of outages and remove dangerous foliage from people’s property “with intention that it will never hit a power line.” The utility also plans to implement tools that will help them reach the industry standard of alerting customers 72 hours in advance of a preventative shut down. 

Velasquez Horvath added Xcel has had 500 crew members out restoring power every day since the outage. “Typically we start with really big numbers, like 2,000 people on one electric line,” and move “down to the individual customers who had their electric service line directly fed to their homes,” she said. “Those are the outages we’re troubleshooting now.” 

Xcel will continue meetings it began yesterday with the commissioners, mayors, and 115 small businesses at a town hall hosted by the Boulder Chamber of Commerce, adding ones with Gov. Polis and state legislators tomorrow and a Boulder city council meeting April 18.   

But Huntley said, “What we’re hearing from our local fire experts was that, while they were concerned about the wind, we were not in the same situation we were in when the Marshall fire happened. Yes, they were closely monitoring, but it was a different set with a different situational picture.” 

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Too much snow? The epic Colorado ski day at Eldora that wasn’t. https://coloradosun.com/2024/03/17/eldora-skiing-too-much-snow-colorado/ Sun, 17 Mar 2024 09:26:00 +0000 https://coloradosun.com/?p=376734 snow falling on drifts against a sign that says Welcome to EldoraMore than 4 feet of snow fell on the Boulder County resort last week. But even skiers who slept in their trucks hoping for first chair discovered more is not always better. ]]> snow falling on drifts against a sign that says Welcome to Eldora

ELDORA — Like many Colorado skiers, Megan Long’s planning brain is highly developed.

So early this week when the weather radar map lit up over the mountains, so did her prefrontal cortex.

“When you see snow in the forecast, especially a lot of snow, you start figuring out how you can get some of it for yourself,” the Boulder resident said. “It’s time to move those work meetings and find someone else to take the kids to school.”

Storms often peter out and skiers’ planning is rewarded with only a dusting of snow. But for the first time in decades, this week’s storm instead dashed powder dreams by delivering so much snow that three of the state’s favorite Front Range resorts — Eldora, Loveland and Arapahoe Basin — couldn’t open.

“When I got up here at 6 a.m. Thursday morning and was told the resort was closed because of snow, that didn’t even make sense to me,” said Long who was back in the Nederland High School parking lot Friday afternoon after being turned around from the same spot Thursday morning. “Too much snow to ski — is that even a thing in Colorado?”

Long was in line with her fellow powder seekers awaiting word resort workers had dug out from the 4 feet of heavy snow that buried lifts and made the road to Eldora impassible.  

Although Eldora’s website advised a Friday opening was “highly unlikely” and recommended skiers “reframe expectations,” locals had heard from friends on the ski patrol that the lifts would start turning around 1:30 p.m.

A line of vehicles filled with ski gear and anticipation formed, quickly filling the high school parking lot (that was empty because the storm had canceled school for a second day) and snaking back toward town. The sheriff had turned a couple dozen cars around earlier in the day, sending people back to wait at Nederland coffee shops or do more shoveling in their own driveways. 

Henry Wood, behind the wheel of the fifth car in line, said he was feeling “pent-up” as he awaited the reopening. He and his teenage son slept in the back of their truck Wednesday night near Eldora hoping to catch the first chair. 

Wood’s tale was a familiar one in the parking lot line, which was filled with powder hounds waiting to get at the 46 inches of snow that had fallen at Eldora in the 48 hours between Wednesday night and Friday morning.

 

All hands on snow shovels required

That 46 inches breaks the two-day record of 43 inches set for the Boulder County resort in 2003. The 2003 storm was the last time Eldora closed because of too much snow. The storm more than two decades ago saw a total of 63 inches fall in 72 hours — the most since they began keeping records in 1872.  

While it’s common for resorts in areas such as Lake Tahoe to close after getting buried in feet of snow, Colorado closures for weather are beyond the comprehension of most local skiers.

While skiers waited, it was all hands on shovels up at the resort. 

“We put a call out from all the department managers that anyone who could get here should come help us dig out,” Eldora marketing director Sam Bass said in a phone interview Friday morning. “For the past two days it’s been shoveling 24/7.”  

an aerial photo graph of a dozen people shoveling a beginner lift
Eldora Mountain workers digging out the ski area’s Tenderfoot carpet lift on Friday. Clearing more than 4 feet of snow from lifts and parking lots required the work of anyone who could reach the mountain. Some of them brought hand tools from home. (Cullen McHale, Eldora Mountain)

About 20 employees answered the call on Thursday. About a dozen of those employees spent the night at the resort, sleeping on the lodge floor between shoveling shifts. On the runs, ski patrollers were busy with avalanche mitigation after a storm that left every slope of more than 25 degrees at risk of sliding. 

Judging by the assortment of colorful plastic shovels, random gardening implements and even a couple of pickaxes seen at the resort Friday, employees brought their equipment from home to tackle the snow. In addition to hand shovels, the resort’s three snow plows and half dozen hand-push snowblowers were running for 48 hours nonstop — with new snow falling all the while. 

“We had to dig out the road on our side of the gate, our parking lot, the lodge decks and entrances and the top and bottom terminals of all the lifts,” Bass said. “It was snowing non-stop, so the moment we shoveled anything out it would fill back in again. It was astounding, I’ve never seen anything like it in 20-plus years in Colorado.” 

workers in blue jackets shovel snow under a ski lift
Lift operations workers used shovels and snowblowers to clear snow from the base of Sundance chair Friday, after record snowfall buried Eldora Mountain. Before workers reached Sundance, they first dug out the resort’s main lift, Alpenglow, then moved to the lower mountain and worked west clearing all of the lift base and summit terminals. (Mike Fields, Eldora Mountain)

The resort and the roads to it were an unreal scene for local skiers who felt like they went to sleep in Colorado and woke up in Lake Tahoe. In Boulder Canyon the boughs of pine trees were folded by the heavy snow. In Nederland, feet of snow accumulated on parked cars during the day-and-a-half that snowmobiles were the only vehicles moving on local roads. 

Access was the primary factor in the decision to close the three Colorado resorts Wednesday. Interstate 70 that carries skiers to Arapahoe Basin and Loveland was shut down for hours Thursday and the smaller county roads that lead to Eldora were plagued by avalanches and drifting snow. Loveland and A-Basin were able to reopen Friday morning.

Eldora skiers were schooled in the slow pace of road maintenance Friday as they refreshed the resort’s webpage again and again, hoping for word that the resort would open.

At 5:30 a.m. the resort posted that a county grader had gone off the road, further reducing the chance of a Friday opening. Most Front Range skiers followed the resort’s advice to put off a trip to Eldora until the weekend, leaving mostly locals lined up at the high school when Boulder County deputies finally let traffic head up to the ski hill.   

Packed carloads cheered as they passed 10-foot-plus mountains of snow lining the road and surrounding the parking lot. The hooting and hollering continued as skiers and snowboarders loaded onto the dug-out lifts and intensified as they finally got their boards on the powder they had been dreaming about for days.

Skiers and a snowboarder looking down from a chair lift and cheering
Skiers were stoked when the lifts started turning again at Eldora Mountain Friday afternoon. Many of them heard from friends working on the mountain that the lifts and parking lots had been cleared of about 4 feet of snow and had lined up in the parking lot at Nederland High School to wait for the road to the ski area to open. (Cullen McHale, Eldora Mountain)

More water than powder

But it wasn’t the “powder” Coloradans are used to. 

“This isn’t the light, dry snow we usually get,” Bass explained. “It’s denser and inconsistent. Also it’s so deep you can’t move on a gentle slope.”

Skiers and boarders quickly learned about the new type of snow, that became even heavier when the sun came out at Eldora midday. Even the most experienced were taken down by the snow and exhausted by digging out of it. 

On the lift a group of CU students discussed how it wasn’t a day for turning, but rather keeping your skis straight and going “full send” until thigh-deep snow slowed you to a stop. Underneath the chair a pack of teens off school for a snow day attempted back flips as their friends cheered them on. 

snowboarders try to get up from deep snow
Skiers who made it to Eldora Mountain on Friday, said it was not a day for turns. Instead, some said, it was a day for going “full send” until thigh-deep snow slowed you to a stop, which is what happened to these snowboarders. (Chryss Cada, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Whether their jumps were successful or not, there was a soft landing Friday for everyone.

In the trees and on the sides of the runs there were uncut lines to be found until last chair.

“This is the craziest snow ever!” shouted one woman as she floated down smooth snow protected from the sun by the glade of trees around her. “I’m so happy!”

Others had more complaints than compliments for the 4-feet of foreign snow, with one bedraggled skier asking,  “For this I got up at 4 a.m. — twice?”

Any negative reports about the snow seemingly didn’t make it to the Front Range. All of Eldora’s lots were full by 9:30 a.m. Saturday morning. The resort groomed several runs for those not up to the challenge of the unusual snow. 

“Maybe this wasn’t the powder day people were hoping for, but there is a silver lining to this storm,” Bass said. “All of this snow is going to make for an amazing remainder of the season.”

a skier moving through heavy snow
A ski patroller makes first tracks in deep, heavy snow at Eldora Mountain on Friday. The ski patrol worked on avalanche control starting Thursday. (Cullen McHale, Eldora Mountain)
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