High winds caused some damage last week

By: 
Barbara Anne Greene

Some trees and buildings in the Basin area took the brunt of high winds on Tuesday, June 8. The winds took out a portion of a fence at Randi Lynn and Rory Noble’s on Antelope Street. Yet just yards away the wind didn’t rip off any of the building paper on the outside of the new cabins under construction on the property.

The back portion of the roof on the Noble residence was damaged as well. Rory said their camper was moved a few feet by the wind.

The Wyoming Retirement Center lost a tree, a retaining wall, a fence and a picnic table due to the wind.

Denise and Brian Ellis lost a chimney and the power box was ripped partially off the side of their home due to a top of a tree being blown into their home. They also lost some siding.

Compared to the windstorm in 2018 that boasted winds up recorded at 78 mph, trees in Basin fared better this year. In 2018 two pines trees snapped in half in Washington Park. The Loob home on Holdredge lost four trees. A birch tree in front of the library went down. The Mills and Vanlandinghams also lost trees. Power poles were also knocked down, leaving Basin residents without power for many hours.

There was a short power outage within the town limits that Tuesday, but outlying areas were without power for hours. The outage had crews from Big Horn REA and Rocky Mountain Power scrambling to restore service. Basin didn’t have any long outages.

Town of Basin electrician Stacey Lesher said that there were two short outages only within the town. Those were caused by the wind whipping the power lines. He responded to one home that had a tree fall on the power line. The home never lost power, though. The following day he removed branches from wires around town.

Big Horn REA line supervisor Bill Dahlke said their customers and system faired very well. They had some outages on a circuit that runs to Shell.

Ninety-eight Rocky Mountain customers were affected, according to company spokesman David Eskelsem. The power went out around 3:30 p.m. and was restored by 7 p.m. The cause was likely an arc between two power lines caused by them whipping around in the wind. That sent a signal to the substation and a circuit breaker was activated as a protective measure.