GOSHEN COUNTY – A combination of freezing fog, drizzling rain, heavy snow and dangerous winds resulted in thousands of Goshen County residents losing electricity and being told to ‘shelter in place’ during blizzard conditions.
Service was restored to rural residents around 10 p.m. Sunday night, but it could have been longer, according to Wyrulec Company General Manager Ryan Schilreff.
“I can’t say enough about our employees’ work ethic,” he said. “It was a bad storm, and they worked very hard to restore power. A little bit of luck helped us out, as well. I thought maybe we’d be out of power for another night, but due to their hard work they got everybody back on, which was nice.”
According to Goshen County Emergency Manager Shelly Kirchhefer, the storm produced sustained winds of 20 to 25 m.p.h. in its early hours and grew steadily from that point.
“There were places here in the county that I think sustained anywhere between 50 and 70 mph gusts,” Kirchhefer said. “Our snow was blowing around pretty good.”
The wind produced severe snow drifts and resulted in all roads in and out of the county being closed on Saturday. Kirchhefer gave credit to the Wyoming Highway Department of Transportation and the Goshen County Road and Bridge Department for their roles during the storm.
“Kudos to the state highway department for actually getting those roads shut down so folks weren’t travelling in this mess and staying out there plowing and keeping up with the drifts so that when the wind did settle down, they could finish and get the roads open,” she said.
“There were a few medical issues that required people to be transported to Torrington Community Hospital during the storm, but Kirchhefer said she was unaware of any major incidents on the roads.
“We didn’t have that many headaches,” she said. “We had a few medical issues that we needed to get to. We had some folks that were on oxygen. Most of them had their back-up bottles, and a few we had to take into the hospital because they didn’t have enough to get them through the power outage.”
The power outages were widespread in the southern part of the county, Schilreff said. The precipitation and freezing fog caused power lines to ice over, and the wind caused them to “gallop,” ultimately causing a disruption in service to about 3,000 customers.
“We got icing from that mist, then the wind came up and they started bouncing,” he said. “It tore a lot of the hardware on the poles and cross arms up. That’s what we’re doing right now – we’re trying to get all of those repaired. We have quite a lot of clean-up to do and it’s probably going to take us a week or two to get all of our lines back in shape and cleaned up.
“We were fortunate because north of Highway 26, we had some outages but most of our members had power. South of 26, we had a lot of problems especially in the Yoder, Veteran, LaGrange area. We had about 3,000 meters out at one point in time. Last night (Sunday), at about 10 p.m., we got almost all of our residential members back in power.”
The same issues caused outages in the city of Torrington. Dana Youtz, Electrical Superintendent, said galloping lines caused issues at a Western Area Power Administration substation east of town which caused power to be interrupted from Saturday morning until around 8 p.m. that night.
“The new substation east of town they built, had severe galloping on both circuits coming out of that substation from the storm and the ice build-up on the lines, which tripped out the line coming to Torrington,” Youtz said.
“They tried to feed us off of a back-up line coming from Lyman, which lasted about two or three minutes before that kicked out. They lost the transformer in Lyman, and they had some galloping going on.”
WAPA spokesperson Lisa Meiman said crews responded to the issues right away, but road conditions and closures delayed their response.
“The winds in Goshen County, and I think through most of the Front Range, caused lines to gallop, which means the wires were snapping together and causing faults,” she said. “When lines snap together like that, it can cause damage.
“We had to get crews out there to patrol and see if there was any damage on the lines to see if we could restore power. The road conditions and the road closures made accessing the lines very difficult for the crews.”
Road conditions were an obstacle for Wyrulec linemen, as well. Schilreff said his crews ran into deep snow drifts that hampered their progress, but citizens were able to help the crews reach the lines.
“The other thing that kind of hampered us is that there were four- or five-foot drifts in places that we had to get through,” he said. “Some of our members helped us out and plowed us into places that we couldn’t get into, and when we were stuck we had members pull us out with tractors.”
Schilreff said Wyrulec personnel were able to figure out what the issues were, but the conditions made it impossible to address them.
“When those lines start bouncing, we can’t really do much about it,” he said. “The wind is blowing, it’s hard to work into that, the visibility is low – but even if we try to work into that, it’s fighting a losing battle. The lines will bounce into each other and it will lock the breaker out. If we put the breaker back in, the lines are still bouncing. Sometimes, we have to just wait until the wind calms down and we have good visibility.”
