CHEYENNE — By 11 a.m. Friday, Devin Gonzalez was already taking a chainsaw to his third tree on a house in Wyoming’s capital city, cleaning up the carnage left behind by a record-breaking Thursday windstorm that produced gusts up to 109 mph, left thousands without power and uprooted dozens of mature trees.
“Yeah, we got two other jobs finished before this one, and we have several more after it,” said Gonzalez, who works for The Tree Feller.
This job looked a little more intimidating than others, with a huge, 60-foot pine that had been ripped from the ground and left leaning against a historic brick house. Gonzalez and his coworkers were on the roof, tethered by safety lines, using chainsaws to break it down.
“The main focus is when you cut pieces off is to not get more damage to the house,” he said. “In this case it already hit the house.”
Their goal is to get the tree off the house, broken down and in pieces in the front and back yards, then move on to the next emergency. The crew will come back to haul the piles of debris away after attending to other emergencies, Gonzalez said.
“Right now, they’re all emergencies, just some more than others,” he said. “We’re getting down to the ground and going to the next one.
“But normally, a tree like this would take anywhere from — if you got a good crew that’s working hard — maybe three days to a week.”
Record Setting
Thursday’s windstorm was huge even for Wyoming, which is famous — or infamous — for its strong, dangerous winds.
It produced record-setting gusts of 109 mph about 7.5 miles south of Chugwater, the National Weather Service reported.
Along Interstate 80 near Arlington, gusts of 98, 97 and 94 mph were recorded; while at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Cheyenne, another 94 mph gust shook the building.
And at Cheyenne Regional Airport, a record-breaking gust of 92 mph was the highest ever measured in the 30 years the facility has had modern wind-speed recording equipment, said Michael Natoli, an NWS meteorologist based in Cheyenne.
Thursday’s windstorm “was one of the most significant wind events Cheyenne has ever seen,” Natoli told Cowboy State Daily on Friday. “Coming in to work today, I was seeing a lot of downed fences and trees, so there’s a lot of cleanup left.”
Along with record-setting gusts, that same spot near Chugwater that produced the 109 mph gust also had legitimate hurricane-force winds, said Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day.
Hurricane-force winds are at least 75 mph sustained, he said. At that Chugwater sensor, it was 75.2 mph for 2 minutes.
“So, you could say there was a hurricane-force wind along that sensor,” he said.
And before anyone downplays hitting official hurricane force for only 2 minutes, Day agreed that if you’re standing in it, that would likely seem like the longest 2 minutes of your life.
“It’s no joke,” he said. “We experienced a tropical situation there for a moment. Yesterday is a good example of why hurricanes cause so much devastation, and at our altitude, the force of those winds on objects is less.”
Even with less force at altitude, prolonged sustained winds over 60 mph with gusts routinely hitting in the high 80 mph range Thursday was plenty to snap power poles, bring down lines and knock out the electricity for thousands of people.
While much of Wyoming experienced high winds, Cheyenne was the eye of the storm, both Day and Natoli said.
Power Out For Thousands
For Black Hills Energy, which supplies power for Cheyenne and the surrounding area, that meant outages for up to 14,000 customers at one point Thursday, said Black Hills spokeswoman Laurie Farkas.
Within a few hours, about 7,000 of those customers had power restored. Crews worked around the clock, and by late Friday morning, that number was down to about 460 customers, she said.
Much of that work was done by linemen who dangle in the bucket at the end of a cherry-picker while getting knocked around by the wind, Farkas said.
“It’s tremendous what they do,” she said. “This storm did produce some pretty extensive damage. … It was truly epic.”
“Black Hills Energy resumed its work to restore power to customers impacted by the severe winds that toppled trees and downed powerlines,” the company says in a statement. “Extra crews are assisting in the effort.
“Teams will continue working across Cheyenne throughout the day to replace broken power poles, string new lines and repair extensive damage to the system.”
The same is happening for Rocky Mountain Power, which supplies electricity for a large part of Wyoming.
High winds also impacted about 6,700 customers, said company spokesman Jona Whitesides.
“We got hit pretty hard in the Casper-Douglas area mid-morning to early afternoon,” he said, adding that some of the outages were intentional shutoffs because of fire danger from sparking power lines.
“Because the Intermountain West has been so dry, the fire conditions were such that we placed some customers on safety settings,” Whitesides said.
Outside Cheyenne, the area most impacted by power outages was Lander, where about 5,200 people were without electricity on Thursday, he said.
About Those Trucks
Thursday’s windstorm grounded commercial trucks from driving through much of the state, including all of Interstate 80 from Nebraska to Utah, and I-25 from the Colorado border to its intersection with I-90 north of Casper, according to the Wyoming Department of Transportation.
That didn’t keep dozens of semitrailers from blowing over Thursday, said Wyoming Highway Patrol spokesman Aaron Brown.
There were about 32 commercial trucks that blew over in Wyoming on Thursday, he said, but that number could be more.
The most concentrated number of blowovers was on I-25 near Cheyenne, he said, where about 15 were reported.
“I’m guessing there’s more than that, they’re just not reported yet,” Brown told Cowboy State Daily on Friday. “And this is not over. I know in Cheyenne, we’re expecting gusts (Friday and Saturday) as high as 65 mph.”
At one point during Thursday’s windstorm, the power cut out at the WYDOT dispatch center, he said. A backup generator kicked on and allowed dispatchers to keep directing resources to the dozens of incidents they were tracking.
“Dispatch did an incredible job making sure people were where they needed to be, even when the power went out at the dispatch center,” Brown said.
There was one fatality involving a semitruck Thursday night, Brown said, but he’s not sure yet if it was a wind-related crash.
“It did end up on its side,” he said about the crash at about mile marker 59 of Wyoming Highway 28.
Those major interstates remain closed to trucks that aren’t over a certain weight, ranging from 35,000 pounds to 65,000 pounds, depending on how strong the winds are on particular stretches of road.
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
