Elyse M Grasso

The joys of Boulder in winter. About midnight the wind at NCAR backed around to due west, temps rose by 20 degrees F, and the winds picked up a bit: 30 mph winds with 50 to 60 mph gusts. There were a few hours of 60 mph winds with 80mph gusts, but that seems to be slacking off. A little.

It's hard to say how much snow we got, maybe an inch, but its been blowing sideways and drifting so current depths range from nothing to 'oh, well, that's annoying, glad the plow guy came'

#weather #BoulderCO

Jan 26 at 4:17pmWeb
Show threadElyse M GrassoJan 26

Hmmm. Power went out at 10:20, apparently. My solar backup kicked in, so I did not notice until I got a message from Xcel saying they are working on it. For a place that gets this windy (this is at least the 5th instance of 80+ mph winds this season) they have way too many above-ground power lines.

#BoulderCO #weather #powerOutage

Show threadArtemisJan 26
@ElyseMGrasso at least I have seen tech crews with a trenching machine working on the problem
Show threadElyse M GrassoJan 26
@Artemis201 Xcel just paid 640 million for their share of the damage done by the Marshall Fire, so they have some incentive to try to prevent future downed power lines. Especially since our high winds are chinooks that suck the moisture out of everything.(I got a small amount of the direct cash, and the benefit that since the insurance companies are not taking the full hit, we can still get fire insurance in this area.)
Show threadChristy Marx Rambling WriterJan 27
@ElyseMGrasso @Artemis201
Glad you got some money from that. We've gotten settlement money from PG&E for the Camp Fire but no amount of money can replace everything we lost.
Show threadAnderlandbooksJan 26
@ElyseMGrasso stay safe!
Show threadElyse M GrassoJan 26
@anderlandbooks My rebuilt house has a sort of aerodynamic shape, with stuccoed walls and a roof that is as close to being a single piece of metal as I could manage, and it's sealed to PassiveHaus standards. As long as no one is doing something stupid with sparks upwind, I should be OK.
Show threadElyse M GrassoJan 26
For the record, power came back on about 4:20pm, almost exactly 6 hours after it went down. Fortunately, it was a nice sunny day, and my solar system worked well, so I only knew about the outage because I got texts and voicemails and emails from Xcel.
Show threadSharonbw stands with MinnesotaJan 26

@ElyseMGrasso

I'm so glad you've got power back. Thank goodness you have solar!

Show threadGoatsLiveJan 27
@ElyseMGrasso Well designed system then! Glad the power is back for you.