A “dry microburst” hit San Juan County at 7:25 p.m. Wednesday, bringing nearly 60 mph wind gusts that brought down utility poles and tree limbs, according to the National Weather Service.
Strong winds also hit the Durango area, knocking out power to 10,000 residents.
“We did see high winds in Farmington with storms coming in from the Four Corners in Utah and Arizona,” said meteorologist Michael Anand of the National Weather Service.
The Four Corners Regional Airport in Farmington recorded wind speeds of up to 57 mph that lasted about 15 minutes, Anand said.
“A dry microburst is when you have rainfall from a storm and the low levels are dry. The rain evaporates creating a cold burst of air that hits the surface and spreads out causing strong wind gusts, when it hits the ground,” Anad said.
With the microburst came downed power lines and tree limbs, followed by power outages.
“We had an outage last night from two poles damages in the Navajo Dam area,” said Hank Adair, director of Farmington Electric Utility System.
At least one pole was damaged in the Fruitland area, and trees were downed throughout the county, Adair said.
Adair was happy to report that the electric utility has its “system hardened pretty good,” because there were not too many outages considering the damage to trees. The poles that did go down were in remote areas.
“It kept our crews busy through the night,” Adair said, adding crews were still working on the Fruitland outage late into Thursday morning.
San Juan County wasn’t the only area hit by the microburst. Durango and the Animas Valley also experienced lightning and strong winds that left 10,000 La Plata Electric Association customers without power Wednesday evening.
The outage happened about 8 p.m., when a tree branch snapped and hit a transmission line that serves multiple substations, according to Jerry Sutherlin, vice president of operations with LPEA. The tree branch broke near Miller Middle School in the Junction Creek area in west Durango, he said.
“It was nuts. It was like a microburst came through,” Sutherlin said. “The lightning mixed with the high winds, it’s a bad combination for power.”
Power was completely restored to all customers by 9:13 p.m., he said.
David Byers, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Grand Junction, said the lightning and whipping winds were most likely the result of a downburst. He said downbursts come from surrounding storms and can travel 10 to 30 miles from the point of origin.
“If a downburst occurs up a canyon it can come down a canyon,” he said. “And if there are lots of cells, you can get a downburst over multiple locations and then they converge.”
He added: “It seems like drier air has been pushing in, which pushes the bases of thunderstorms higher. The higher they are, the more wind you get out of them.”
Shane Benjamin of The Durango Herald contributed to this article.
