By Louis E. Guzmán
Editor’s note: This article is the first in a series on emergency management (EM) in Colorado Springs and adjacent counties. For contextual purposes this article describes a hypothetically severe “incident,” a snowstorm of a size never before experienced in eastern Colorado. Subsequent articles will outline the EM resources in the region that would respond to an incident of similar magnitude.
Part I -
The Perfect Snow Storm:
It was early October and the summer heat had been dissipating for weeks. The monsoon season had passed and atmospheric conditions were in place for a transition to fall-winter weather, a time when the old adage, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait 30 minutes,” applies in much of Colorado. Now the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Pueblo was reporting ominous atmospheric conditions that just might make that old saying a bit too real.
Once before violent weather had raised havoc in eastern Colorado at about the same time of the year, testing the state’s emergency resources to the limit. During the weekend of Oct. 25 and 26, 1997, two feet to four feet of snow was dumpled in the middle counties of eastern Colorado with less than 10 inches of snow north beyond Fort Collins, and gradually declining amounts as far south as Pueblo. That storm was to go down in the records as “The Blizzard of ’97”.
Temperatures dropped well into the freezing range as snow accumulated. Blizzard strength winds added one more merciless hazard to already severe conditions, and
15-foot snowdrifts literally buried thousands of homes across the middle counties, isolating families in deteriorating weather. Road traffic of all types was stopped cold.
Interstate 25, the principal thoroughfare from New Mexico to Wyoming, was shut down between Pueblo and Denver. Thousands of cars and trucks of every size were caught unprepared and were stranded in piles of drifting snow. Public and volunteer fire department teams were converted into emergency rescue units, desperately seeking out thousands of isolated residents across the snow-blanketed counties of eastern Colorado.
City and county snow removal equipment was stretched to the limit, and power line crews worked feverishly in the cold weather to restore electricity to homes and businesses. Even military units were called in to assist in the rescue efforts.
This time atmospheric conditions reminiscent of the ’97 storm were developing, once again. Two low-pressure areas, for example, lay to the south of Colorado, one over the Arizona-New Mexico border, the other to the southeast over central Texas. Both were poised to bring rain and snow to the state’s eastern fringe. The weather makers were far enough away, though, that even given typically volatile fall meteorological dynamics, the storm’s intensity should not be alarming were it not for weather conditions north of the state.
Much like the Blizzard of ’97, cold high-pressure air lay to the north in the form of two fronts. On the northwest quadrant was a lobe of North Pacific air, moving aggressively southwest over northern Utah and southern Idaho. On the northeast, separated from the northwest high by an isolated (cutoff) low, was a second cold front. Though it was stagnant over central Nebraska and southern South Dakota, it was interesting to weathermen because it was a cell within a broader, potentially more powerful mass of Arctic-Canadian air. At the Weather Service offices, the upper air steering currents were being watched with high interest.
During the ensuing 12 hours, having received surface- and upper-air data specific to central and eastern Colorado at three-hour intervals, weather forecasters in Pueblo and Denver hiked up snowfall predictions by 50 percent to 100 percent. Forecast snow values were now up to 10 inches to 20 inches, and wind gusts were to range up to 40 mph in the eastern mountain fringes and near High Plains.
The strongest indicators of potential change came from swifter northern movements of the warm moist air to the southwest, matched by the southeast low. The effect was that the lows were merging into a single broad front soon to glide up and over the cold cloud tops of eastern Colorado. The massive circulating system was expected to migrate eastward.
The turbulence was then releasing an unseasonable mix of lightning and thunder as it drifted over mountaintops, dumping energy in the form of rain and snow over the eastern Rockies. The early indicators of the Perfect Snow Storm were in plain sight. Only one more element remained yet to show up, the cold high lurking over the Northern Great Plains.
Updates on weather conditions in the Northern Great Plains at the NWS offices showed only minor changes in the Arctic air mass in the area. The cold air had strengthened, but the front seemed stable.
Three hours later, however, weather over the entire eastern third of Colorado, encompassing portions of the Rocky Mountains and all of the High Plains had gone critical.
Not only was the fused low charging eastward and dumping snow at an alarming rate, the frigid Arctic air over the Northern Great Plains had burst southward and begun diving under the merged unstable humid low, sending it into the even more frigid troposphere. Wind gusts at the surface exceeded 50 miles per hour. Extraordinarily large snow flakes began falling along the fringes of southeastern Colorado.
The NWS office was a frenzy of activity, as the significance of what was developing over much of Colorado struck home. Within minutes of this realization, extreme storm warnings went out to all jurisdictions along the Front Ranges from Fort Collins southward to Pueblo, forecasting snow accumulations of 30 inches to 70 inches in a span of 16 hours to 20 hours in the east central counties of the state. Wind bursts approaching 60 mph were predicted.
Following the snowfall, which might exceed the period anticipated, the Arctic air was expected, optimistically, to remain some 72 hours with the possibility that it would last still longer. With that amount of snow insulating earth surfaces and lower air well into the freezing range, with power and heating fuel cut off, and with living conditions for any people isolated in much of eastern Colorado, help for the elderly, the infirm and the young would be critical.
Personal communications between the weather office and EM offices in eastern Colorado Springs hinted that the effective meteorological conditions the region was facing were outside even the direst extrapolations ever contemplated in the office’s projections
In the dozens of emergency management offices across the state, from the tiniest jurisdiction to the major cities, what had been a hypothetical scenario suddenly became reality. Emergency response plans, the glue that linked the offices and their personnel together, were now to be tested.
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