A blizzard that caused whiteout conditions last week in Silverton delivered than heavy snowfall and powerful winds. Residents also found themselves without power and isolated from the rest of the world.
“I was traumatized by last Wednesday,” said DeAnne Gallegos, a Silverton resident and spokeswoman for San Juan County and the Office of Emergency Management. “... I noticed that my appliances were turning on and off, just kind of glitching out. I couldn't get the stove to go full-power.”
The electrical failure began about 8:22 a.m. Feb. 22. By 8:30 a.m., the power was completely out, Gallegos said. She wasn’t sure if it was just her house or the entire town.
“Social media is usually the first place I go to because people will start asking on the Silverton community bulletin board, ‘Do you have power?’” she said. “We started texting neighbors and then I realized it was a townwide power outage, which we've weathered before.”
Then things got stranger.
Fifteen minutes after the power outage, the Colorado Department of Transportation closed three mountain passes on U.S. Highway 550 – Coal Bank, Molas and Red Mountain passes – effectively shutting off both routes that lead in and out of Silverton.
“So now we have an undetermined amount of time for our power outage, and now we are snowed in, and there’s a sideways full-on blizzard happening outside,” Gallegos recalled.
An in-town lineman can work on restoring power, Gallegos said, but it was soon learned the outage was not a problem with the local power provider, San Miguel Power; rather, it was Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the wholesale power supplier to the region.
“Tri-State crews are the only ones who are authorized to work on it,” Gallegos said.
An avalanche on Red Mountain Pass closed that route indefinitely, which meant the Tri- State crew was turned around by CDOT on the mountain pass, unable to get into Silverton.
“At this point, we are now completely without power,” Gallegos said. “It was such an intense, blustery blizzard that there was zero visibility through the streets. So the sheriff ordered a ‘protection in place,’ which means to just stay where you're at. Don't go out and about. I literally could not see beyond my windshield wipers. I've never experienced anything like that before.”
Gallegos said Silverton’s emergency team needed to figure out a way to get power to elderly residents on oxygen or possessing CPAP machines. Eventually, they opened the local grocery store which has a backup generator.
“Always in a disaster, we immediately isolate and zero in on our senior population, the vulnerable population,” she said. “Those folks that we know truly need power or oxygen or do not have a non-wood stove in their home.”
While Gallegos and her team were opening the grocery store to those needing electricity and heat, emergency calls were coming in from around town.
“We were receiving a high volume of ambulatory calls,” she said. “There could be no Flight for Life. There was no way out. They were just managing those individual health issues with the actual physical ambulance and our paramedic staff.”
On top of dealing with the power outage, blizzard and road closures, San Juan County Sheriff Bruce Conrad had to deal with another problem: A call had come into the Silverton School that a student had a gun on campus. But the call was part of a nationwide school shooter hoax that also affected Durango High School.
“We were part of those swat calls,” Gallegos said. “So the sheriff was dealing with that on top of everything else. The kids had already been let out of school because of the power outage, but because of FBI protocol, the sheriff's department still has to go through and clear the school for safety reasons.”
Gallegos said she and her team began to work out potential shelters in case the power remained out overnight, but after eight hours, it finally came back on.
“At 4:15, our ambulance director Tyler George sends out a text to the group, ‘My power is on,’” Gallegos said. “Jeff Shay, who's our local lineman, was able to isolate and fix the issue that was within the Tri-State system. By 4:30, we were fully on.”
The mountain passes were eventually reopened by CDOT within the next couple of days, and all returned to normal. But residents learned of one sad bit of news: A longtime resident died that stormy day.
“To end the day, we had a longtime local pass away from natural causes,” Gallegos said. “That's how we ended our day. That's how our ambulance team ended their day. That was very difficult on our community.”
Looking back, Gallegos is grateful for her town and county’s response to what she references as a “snowpocalypse.”
“It was bad, but I'm glad it wasn't worse than that,” she said. “We have an incredibly strong emergency response team with all the different leadership roles that play into that.”
molsen@durangoherald.com
