This has been a very strange weather year, beginning with that huge winter. The long-range forecasts for last winter didn’t see that one coming. It took everybody by surprise, although my hornet nest theory of winter forecasting was dead right. Then, after all that, it quit. It just stopped. May was dry and cold, slowing the snow melt and saving us from devastating flooding. Then early June had some rain, and stayed cold before the frying pan summer hit. July was scorching hot and bone dry. Right up until it wasn’t.
Monday I had almost 2 inches of rain in slightly over an hour. It came down like a fire hose. The raindrops were oddly big, not hailstones, but raindrops that seemed big as grapes. I’ve only seen it rain like that a couple of times in my life. There were streams running down the gravel road, puddles in the yard, and a pasture that had been rapidly becoming a dust bowl was suddenly submerged. The steep dirt road up to the hay farm had gullies washing down it, and another farm road had ponds of water covering it in several places. That’ll settle the dust.
The temperature dropped by 25 degrees in minutes. The river flow spiked, nearly doubling the flow for a few hours, before dropping back to normal levels almost as quickly as it rose. That’s flash-flood kind of stuff in different topography. I was bracing for more, assuming that if it poured like that at my house, up in the higher reaches of the drainage, in the Uintas, it must have been downright Biblical. It usually is. So I was trying to get irrigation ditches shut down before the big surge hit and flooded things.
It never came. The storm was extremely localized. The radar showed it pretty clearly — a little red spot right over my house. I measured over 1.75 inches in one gauge and closer to 2 inches in another. Five miles down the canyon, the ground was dry. There was no surge from the Uintas because it didn’t rain up there, or at least not enough to matter. I heard there was a similar microburst storm around Silver Summit later in the week that would have doused the Home Depot parking lot and gummed up the trails. Watching the radar, there have been small, localized downpours scattered all over. A friend said he got drenched at the top of the Pinecone trail while it was sunny in town.
Oddly, through it all, my power didn’t go out. The power grid in my neighborhood is something less than robust. Most of the poles are the originals from 1937, and they are all listing a bit if not completely rotted off. Power demand in the area has certainly increased in the last 80 years, and there have been new transformers and bigger wires installed, but it still tends to be fragile. When I built my house here, many years ago, a cow burping was enough to knock the power out for hours. Fortunately, we’re well beyond that. But I still expected a storm like that, especially with the lightning it brought, to have taken the power out. It stayed on.
Until the next morning, when a pole caught fire down the canyon and shut it off. I called the automated outage system at Rocky Mountain Power, and worked through the very long menu. I got updates on outages all over the place but finally got to where it registered mine. Then the recording very helpfully told me that I could get more detailed information about the outage and repair schedule by going to their website.
Well, that’s handy. If the pile of electronic stuff I don’t understand was all powered up and working, I could boot up the computer and log in to their site to see that; well, if I could do all that, I could see that my power was actually on and everything was working fine. So I wouldn’t want to be looking at the outage website at all. But since the power was out and none of it works (apparently my battery backup system doesn’t power everything), the website wasn’t much help. But they got the problem solved in a couple of hours and all is well.
As much as I hate those automated systems that make sure you cannot ever talk to a real person, the power company’s reporting system works pretty well. The people who are out there climbing the poles and making the repairs work even better. Finding the problem and getting people on it can’t be easy, and they do it in all kinds of terrible weather conditions, night and day.
Every time there is an outage, I’m surprised by how thoroughly modern life grinds to a halt without power. We’re completely helpless without it.
The rain was fun to watch. Hot and dry as it’s been, we were beginning to worry about the cattle running out of grass before fall. Nothing like 2 inches of rain to solve that problem. It’s green as June out there again.