Winter weather wallop: Storm lashes Park County with blizzard conditions

Posted 12/20/16

Copious amounts of snow began falling in Cody Thursday and moved into Powell that night, accompanied by wind and bitter-cold temperatures.

By late Friday night, Cody was buried under 12-18 inches of snow, while 3-5 inches had fallen in Powell, …

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Winter weather wallop: Storm lashes Park County with blizzard conditions

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One of the harshest winter storms in recent memory struck Powell and Cody late last week with a one-two punch.

Copious amounts of snow began falling in Cody Thursday and moved into Powell that night, accompanied by wind and bitter-cold temperatures.

By late Friday night, Cody was buried under 12-18 inches of snow, while 3-5 inches had fallen in Powell, according to meteorologist Jeff Braun of the National Weather Service Office in Riverton.

The temperature fell steadily in Powell throughout Friday, sinking below zero early that afternoon and remaining in the negative until rising to the single digits above zero for a few hours on Sunday.

The coldest temperature recorded at the Powell airport was 17 degrees below zero at about 8 a.m. Saturday.

At Yellowstone Regional Airport in Cody, the lowest temperature was minus 23 degrees, Braun said.

Winds with the storm were intense Friday, with a top wind gust of 44 miles per hour at Powell Municipal Airport, Braun said. But those winds abated on Saturday.

By Sunday morning, Braun said the weather had moderated slightly in Powell, with the low temperature of 11 degrees below zero around 8 a.m. and the winds were nearly calm.

But the conditions in Cody on Sunday were drastically different.

That morning, the temperature in Cody rose significantly, from 20 degrees below zero a few hours earlier to 12 degrees above zero around 8 a.m. But that warming came with high winds — the top wind speed clocked in Cody was 55 mph — causing dangerous wind chills, he said.

The wind also tossed the snow around, piling it in drifts, and that prompted the Wyoming Department of Transportation, the Cody Police Department and the Park County Sheriff’s Office to urge people in Cody to stay inside and off the roads. The Sheriff’s Office described it as a “weather emergency.”

“It’s a very dangerous situation,” said Cody Beers, regional spokesman for the Wyoming Department of Transportation, in an email at about 11 a.m. Sunday.

Beers said roads in and out of Cody were drifted over, and many were impassable.

Park County closed much of the South Fork Road, and WYDOT closed Chief Joseph Scenic Highway.

After a hectic weekend, crews were still working to get those roads open on Monday.

“Really it’s just been an exercise in frustration with this wind and the slick road conditions,” assistant county engineer Jeremy Quist said Monday afternoon.

The county was making the most heavily used South Fork roads a priority and Quist said there were several roads on the North Fork that crews had not yet gotten to.

“It’s tough,” Quist said. “I feel bad for the folks that have been snowed in for several days, but it’s just almost impossible to cover that big of an area” with the dozen or so members of the county’s Cody crew.

“And that wind — that wind is a killer,” Quist said, adding, “you get something open for an hour, and then it just blows shut again.”

Beyond that, wind makes it tricky to stay on top of icy roads; Quist said a couple county road graders slid off the road and got stuck on Monday.

“All of our force is out there, just doing what they can,” he said.

Beers said a snowblower from Basin and a WYDOT crew from Lovell were working to clear the Chief Joseph highway on Monday and they found Tuesday that the wind had undone their efforts. WYDOT hoped to have the highway re-opened on Wednesday afternoon. Conditions got so bad that plows and a wrecker had to be rescued on the mountain highway Saturday night.

Beers said department snowplows also had a difficult time keeping the North Fork Highway (U.S. 14/16/20) open on Sunday; a drift lay across the highway at Wapiti, and another nearly blocked off the west end of the big tunnel near Buffalo Bill Reservoir, he said.

North Fork Highway never did close, “but it was getting drifted pretty bad,” he said.

“We were really at the limits of what we could do ... to help people out,” Beers said. “Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, roads are going to close themselves and you’re going to lose the fight.”

The Powell area wasn’t hit as hard, but Quist said roads in the Heart Mountain area also received large drifts. County crews cleared all the school bus routes with no issues on Monday, but “it’s probably going to be tough in that area the next couple days,” he said.

As for when the entire county road system will be back to normal, “it’s going to take a good portion of this week, at least,” Quist predicted, noting more snow in the forecast.

Terry Foley, who maintains the PowellWeather.net website, said Friday’s storm, accompanied by blizzard conditions, was one of the worst he’s seen in the Powell area. He said he doesn’t recall another one as severe since the early 1990s.

But he said Cody had it a lot worse, between the additional snow and Sunday’s windy conditions.

Foley’s son is the assistant superintendent of schools in Cody, where district officials made the decision Sunday to close schools in Cody on Monday.

“They were debating all day yesterday what to do. But it’s better to err on the side of caution” to keep children safe, Foley said.

(CJ Baker contributed reporting.)

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