Admit it, Colorado, you woke up this morning a little embarrassed with yourself, right?
The fretting over Wednesday morning’s road conditions. The pre-emptive school closures and office half-days and hunkering-down hysterics. All for the meteorological equivalent of a reality-show star.
As winter whuppin’s go, it was just a flash in the pan.
“Snow day turned out to be sunny and beautiful,” one Denver resident posted on her Twitter account Wednesday, a day in which the Colorado legislature and every metro-area school district not on spring break closed because of snow.
By midday Wednesday, the weather was positively benevolent. Clear skies. Clearing streets. Clearly a lot of wasted worry.
But that is not to say the storm didn’t leave its mark across the state.
About 36,500 homes and businesses lost power as the storm dropped heavy, wet snow on power lines and tree limbs. Major distribution lines — those with from 500 to 8,000 customers — were restored first, and crews then moved on to smaller, more local outages, including snapped lines leading into individual homes that are slower to reach and repair, said Xcel spokesman Mark Stutz. A few thousand were still without power Wednesday evening.
“We may still have some outages (today), as people get home and discover they don’t have power,” Stutz said.
Roads snarled during the morning rush, but crews quickly detangled them — aided by warm pavement temperatures and, ironically, worried drivers.
“We don’t know if people are staying home or working on a delayed schedule,” Colorado Department of Transportation spokeswoman Stacey Stegman said. “It’s great for our crews — it makes snow removal that much easier.”
And the storm even brought good news to some parts of the state. Though chunks of the Eastern Plains received only an inch or two of snow, farmers there are excited to start the spring season with plenty of moisture.
“Its nice to go into the spring season with,” said Byron Weathers, president of the Colorado Corn Growers Association and a farmer in Yuma County. “It will benefit all crops from either fall or spring.”
For many areas, melting snow was a bigger story than falling snow. Bob Koopmeiners, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said the snow was packed with moisture — more than one inch of water for every 10 inches of snow.
“It’s just wet, concrete, soggy sponge snow,” Koopmeiners said.
Assuming an average snow cover of 10 inches across the 591 urbanized square miles of the metro area, that amounts to more than 10 billion gallons of water ready to soak into lawns and release into storm drains.
That’s not much of a concern to regional flood-control officials, who said the expected runoff won’t cause problems in the way a sudden summer thunderstorm might.
“What we would see from a storm like this,” said Paul Hindman, the executive director of the Urban Drainage and Flood Control District, “is maybe just some minor flooding of the pedestrian paths but nothing really major that’s going to cause any property damage.”
The runoff kept city crews busy Wednesday, though, making sure that storm drains and inlets remained free of slush and debris. Denver even deployed a specialized vacuum truck to suck gunk out of the drains.
“The runoff has not been as bad as we were thinking,” said Chris Carna han, the operations manager for Aurora’s Public Works Department. “It’s been warming slowly. We were afraid it was going to be warming really fast, and it was going to be flood time.”
There is a slight chance snow and rain could return to the Front Range by the end of the week, but today is expected to be sunny and dry. In other words, back to work, Colorado.
But keep nurturing those snow-day hopes. Winter’s not likely done with the state yet.
“We’ll probably get more before the end of April,” Koopmeiners said.
Staff writer Yesenia Robles contributed to this report.
John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or jingold@denverpost.com
