{"id":32547,"date":"2023-08-03T20:28:54","date_gmt":"2023-08-04T02:28:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/farmington-utility-poles-tree-branches-downed-in-strong-winds\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T01:59:22","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T07:59:22","slug":"farmington-utility-poles-tree-branches-downed-in-strong-winds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/farmington-utility-poles-tree-branches-downed-in-strong-winds\/","title":{"rendered":"Farmington utility poles, tree branches downed in strong winds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"A
A large branch from this elm tree in Kiwanis Park broke about 7:30 p.m. during a dry microburst that hit the region around 7:25 p.m. as part of an eastward weather system.<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

A \u201cdry microburst\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Strong winds also hit the Durango area, knocking out power to 10,000 residents.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did see high winds in Farmington with storms coming in from the Four Corners in Utah and Arizona,\u201d said meteorologist Michael Anand of the National Weather Service.<\/p>\n

The Four Corners Regional Airport in Farmington recorded wind speeds of up to 57 mph that lasted about 15 minutes, Anand said.<\/p>\n

\u201cA 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,\u201d Anad said.<\/p>\n

With the microburst came downed power lines and tree limbs, followed by power outages.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had an outage last night from two poles damages in the Navajo Dam area,\u201d said Hank Adair, director of Farmington Electric Utility System.<\/p>\n

At least one pole was damaged in the Fruitland area, and trees were downed throughout the county, Adair said.<\/p>\n

Adair was happy to report that the electric utility has its \u201csystem hardened pretty good,\u201d because there were not too many outages considering the damage to trees. The poles that did go down were in remote areas.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt kept our crews busy through the night,\u201d Adair said, adding crews were still working on the Fruitland outage late into Thursday morning.<\/p>\n

San Juan County wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\"Strong
Strong winds snapped tree branches and knocked out power to 10,000 La Plata Electric Association customers Wednesday night in the Durango area. Three cars in the west 100 block of 11th Street were hit by a broken tree branch. (Leah Veress\/Durango Herald)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was nuts. It was like a microburst came through,\u201d Sutherlin said. \u201cThe lightning mixed with the high winds, it\u2019s a bad combination for power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Power was completely restored to all customers by 9:13 p.m., he said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf a downburst occurs up a canyon it can come down a canyon,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if there are lots of cells, you can get a downburst over multiple locations and then they converge.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shane Benjamin of The Durango Herald contributed to this article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

clocked at 57 mph at Farmington Airport<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32548,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,414],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-32547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-weather"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81837,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32547\/revisions\/81837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32547"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=32547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}