It was officially bitterly cold this past weekend after a cold front swept through the area, prompting local schools to hold a “virtual school day” and most events to be canceled.
According to reports by the National Weather Service out of Cheyenne, temperatures averaged -11 degrees without windchill on Saturday, January 13 in Wheatland. There was a low of -20 and a high of -9 degrees that same day. The sensor at Phifer Field in Wheatland quit working at 11 p.m. on Saturday, and as of press time, according to the NWS, is still not functioning.
Sensors thirteen miles southeast of Glendo recorded temperatures of -54 with wind chill at 7 in the morning on Saturday; and Guernsey reported a high of -8 degrees at 3 p.m., dropping to -21 degrees at 8:55 p.m. and -39 degrees wind chill that night before it warmed up to a balmy 2 degrees above zero on Sunday.
There is an estimated half-foot of snow that came down over the weekend, and the NWS has a request posted on their Facebook page, asking for people to send in snow measurements and pictures.
With the bitterly cold temperatures, warnings were posted on the Wheatland and Guernsey websites reminding residents to keep their faucets at a slow drip to keep water pipes from freezing. A Wheatland water line break on Monday morning near an electrical box prompted local officials to shut down streetlights and decorative lights downtown as a safety precaution. It was unknown at press time if this leak is related to the temperature extremes.
There was an outage Saturday morning reported by the Wheatland Rural Electric Association, but Operations Manager Levi Eaton said, “We didn’t have any [weather related issues], and I think we fared pretty well.”
Residents and travelers in and through Platte County need to continue to be prepared for frigid temperatures and hindered road travel resulting from blizzard conditions with forecasts of wind gusts reaching up to 65 miles per hour this week.
