Trees toppled power lines causing outages for at least 12,000 people in the Denver metro area and flash-flooding swamped intersections and filled basements with water, keeping emergency workers scrambling through the night.
“People are waking up and realizing they don’t have power,” said Michelle Aguayo, spokeswoman for Xcel Energy. “We had a dozen crews out all through the night and we’ve sent more out this morning. Everybody is working.”
More stormy weather is expected Saturday and Sunday, but there is less of a chance of severe weather including tornadoes, said National Weather Service meteorologist Chad Gimmestad.
“We’ll have another round of scattered heavy rain and hail today and tomorrow and then we’ll be back to normal warm temperatures on Monday,” Gimmestad said.
The first round of rain was impressive, flooding intersections as it moved across downtown headed toward Denver International Airport about 2:15 p.m. Between ½ and 1 inch of rain was possible withing 30 minutes.
On Friday night, the Denver Police Department sent out numerous warnings during the heart of an intense hail and lightning storm that tied up emergency lines with calls.
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“Severe weather is causing flooding of streets in areas of the city as well as trees falling down,” Denver police wrote in one Tweet late Friday night. “Avoid travel if possible!!”
Aguayo cautioned people to avoid downed power lines.
“Always assume that the power lines are live,” she said. “There are a lot of downed power lines.”
The reports of power outages came from across the Denver area and were not focused in any given area. Electric customers in Central Denver, Arvada, Golden, Boulder and Downtown Denver reported outages.
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Heavy winds knocked trees over, sometimes downing power lines. The storm toppled large trees.
“It looks like people were picking vegetables out of a garden,” Aguayo said.
Weather forecasters at the National Weather Service were on the verge to issue a severe flashflooding watch late Friday night when rain and hail was pounding the metro area at a rate of about an inch a half hour.
“It came in a really short period of time,” Gimmestad said. “It’s just a phenomenal rain fall rate.”
But fortunately the storm moved faster than the day before and didn’t have a large accumulative affect, Gimmestad said.
A few tornadoes touched down in Colorado Friday afternoon and evening. One in Parker damaged a few buildings and a larger “beautiful” funnel cloud about 10 miles West of Cope on the Eastern Plains was on the ground for nearly 10 minutes with no reported damage to buildings.
Gimmestad said several homes along in El Dorado Springs were evacuated because of flooding related more to melting mountain snow than rain.
“If it got hot this week we might have more trouble with flooding,” he said.
Temperatures could rise to around 80 Saturday, the low 70s Sunday and low to mid 80s Monday through Wednesday, Gimmestad said.
Anyone experiencing power problems can call Xcel’s emergency number at 800-895-1999.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, kmitchell@denverpost.com or twitter.com/kirkmitchell
