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Powerful downdraft lifts vans in Rockwood

‘It’s a big thing to get picked up’
Robert Meeker, Jeep tour manager at Mild to Wild, describes damages, including broken windows and a bent hitch, to one of the company’s buses during a microburst Saturday afternoon in Rockwood.

Robert Meeker said he has never seen anything like it.

Jeep tour manager for Mild to Wild Raft and Jeep Tours Inc., Meeker was going over the damage caused by a microburst, a powerful downdraft of air that spreads out on impact with the ground. The microburst Saturday afternoon actually lifted the rear ends of two company vans, with trailers attached, off the ground, setting one down nearly on top of another.

No injures were reported, and the only witness could not be reached Sunday.

The other vehicle belonged to Matt Wilson of 4 Corners Whitewater. Both were parked at the Rockwood train station, near an Animas River take-out during a violent storm Saturday.

“Anything that would lift up two vehicles,” Meeker said. “That’s pretty spectacular.”

Meeker said the 15-passenger Mild to Wild van, a Ford E-450 with a 7.3 liter engine, was designed to be an ambulance.

“It’s a big thing to get picked up,” he said. “I think the weight on these things is 30,000 pounds.”

Wilson’s vehicle roof was smashed, and his trailer was bent and distorted. A tire was flattened. Both vehicles had body damage. The Mild to Wild vehicle had damaged windows and siding pulled up where it slid down off of the 4 Corner’s van. The trailer hitches on both vehicles were twisted, and 2-foot by 6-foot boards that hold boats were shattered.

“There was another vehicle up there that had its windows blown out,” Wilson said. “But it was a direct hit onto our vans.”

While heavy rains and hail traveled over Rockwood and the Hermosa areas, microbursts are highly localized columns of rapidly sinking air that form when thunderstorms begin to collapse, according to Tom Renwick of National Weather Service.

Sort of like an elevator made of air, cut loose, careening down an elevator shaft.

“You’ve got this cold air that immediately goes straight down,” Renwick said, saying microbursts can easily create wind speeds of up to 80 mph.

“Could that lift some stuff up? Definitely,” he said.

“The reason they do so much damage is that when it starts to get windy slowly, things like trees will start to bend,” he said. “But if you’re sitting at calm winds, and then within five seconds, you’re going to 80 mph, that’s when stuff breaks like twigs.”

The weather phenomenon is short-lived but capable of falling swaths of dense forests. They’re a common concern in air traffic.

La Plata County’s director of emergency preparedness Butch Knowlton was called to the scene Saturday and verified the rafting vehicles did, indeed, leave the ground. After speaking with the single witness, a Rockwood resident and employee of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, then surveying the area, Knowlton found numerous signs of what had occurred.

“The front axles did not come off the ground, but the rear ends of the vehicles and the trailers were quite high in the air,” Knowlton said. “There is evidence of that because the top of one of the vans was damaged. The other van had actually gone high enough, it came down on the top of the other vehicle.”

He said there was debris moved around in the area and blown under the vehicles

“It was very impressive,” he said. “Heavy debris, like 4-by-4s, 10-feet long, and the only way they could have gotten there was if those vehicles were up in the air.”

The National Weather Service is forecasting isolated thunderstorms for Durango with pockets of heavy rain and hail in the San Juan Mountains through the week. Heavier storms may return to Durango next weekend.

bmathis@durangoherald.com



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