Then it happened all over again. Quick on the heels of the remnants of Hurricane Priscilla came the remnants of another tropical system, Pacific Tropical Storm Raymond. It was less than 24 hours from the end of the rain from Priscilla to the beginnings of the rain from Raymond. Raymond did not produce quite as much rain as Priscilla, but it was still a lot. And with the ground saturated from Priscilla's rain, more of it ran off, and the result was that in many areas the flooding was even worse. At 5:15 a.m. on Tuesday, the river crested at 12.82 feet in Pagosa Springs, even higher than Saturday. Once again, all the same roads were closed and the same areas flooded, but now a little higher in several places. And this time in South Fork, CO, too, where three homes were flooded and multiple sections of US 160 on the east side of Wolf Creek Pass went under water.
With this storm, we got another 1.99" of rain at our house. This was pretty representative of rainfall amounts around the immediate Pagosa Springs area from the remnants of TS Raymond. This brought our combined total for the two storms to 5.13 inches from early Friday morning to early Tuesday morning.
Part One - Remnants of Hurricane Priscilla
The river fell about 3 feet from the crest by early Sunday morning, then remained at that level through much of the day. I took some pictures Sunday afternoon:
River in downtown Pagosa around 2:30 Sunday afternoon, still flowing strongly:
While the pool and a couple of the upper soaking tubs in the main area of The Springs Resort were not flooded and are open, many of the soaking tubs did flood and are closed.
At least one soaking tub was still flooded this afternoon, even after the river had fallen several feet from its crest.
Still some big logs in the river, too.
This debris left over from the crest shows that the river was over the Riverwalk.
According to the Pagosa Weather website, the all-time record crest in 1911 (about 5 feet higher than these floods) was also the result of a tropical system, and the second-highest in 1927 may have been, too. After those floods and these two floods, the next 3 highest were from spring snow runoff. So yes, although they are rare, some of the biggest floods in and near the southwest Colorado mountains do result from tropical systems. And behind the remnants of Priscila, those of Tropical Storm Raymond were moving in along the same track as Priscilla. This one did not look quite as intense, but nonetheless the river flood warning from the NWS suggested that the crest from that rain could be the fourth-highest on record. Actually, as discussed below, it was higher.
One other note: we received 3.14 inches of rain at our house from the remnants of Hurricane Priscilla. This on top of an above-average 2.19 inches for the month of September. Before that our area was in extreme drought, and 2 months ago the river was at record low levels for early to mid August. And we were at one point in pre-evacuation for a wildfire less than 4 miles away.
Part II - Remnants of Tropical Storm Raymond
In response to new heavy rains from remnants of Pacific Tropical Storm Raymond, the San Juan River in Pagosa Springs again began rapidly rising and was again above flood stage by early evening. The new crest was predicted to be similar to Saturday's. the third-highest on record. However, as heavy rain continued into the evening, it began to appear that it might even be higher, and that turned out to be the case.
Knowing the river was on the rise again, I decided to head down around 5 to get some pictures before dinner. I was there from around 5:15 to 5:30, around the time when the river again reached the flood stage of 10.5 feet - close to a foot and a half higher than when I was there Sunday afternoon. It was indeed noticeably higher, and since it was once again rising, it was picking a lot of debris. Below is a picture of an entire tree going down the river that I took around 5:30 this afternoon. I had just switched from video to stills when I saw the tree. It was moving so fast I was afraid that I would entirely miss it if I tried to switch back to video, so I just took stills.
You can see that the water was now higher than when I had been there the previous day in the following pictures of the lowest soaking tub ad The Springs Resort - barely flooded in the first picture from Sunday, totally inundated, including most of the handrail for its steps, on Tuesday:
The resort did sandbag this time, to try to keep the rest of the soaking tubs from flooding again:
Unfortunately, this effort was unsuccessful. As you can see best in the picture of the flooded soaking tub two pictures above, the sandbag wall was lower there and was already close to being overtopped. Eventually the entire sandbag wall was overtopped and everything that flooded Sunday flooded again by Tuesday morning - and even a little more, since Tuesday's crest was a couple inches higher than Sunday's.
Here is some video I took of the flood, Monday 10/13 around 5:25 p.m.:
An article from the Pagosa Sun from around the time of the crest, which includes video of the flooding at The Springs Resort, can be seen here.
Total rainfall from the combined storms was around 5-6 inches in the immediate Pagosa Springs area. At our house, it came to 5.13 inches. Since September 1, rainfall has been around sevem and a third inches at our house - more than we had gotten in the first 8 months of the year, and, in less than 6 weeks, about 40 percent of the average for the entire year. Between the two storms, some locations in the mountans received a total of 9-10 inches of rain. Due to the tropical nature of these storms, there was not much snow in the mountains, with only minor accumulations even on the highest peaks.
Throughout the entire Priscilla event and the early and middle parts of the Raymond event, the precipitation was largely stratiform, though with moderate to occasionally heavy rain over an extended time. There was no thunder at all in the Priscilla event, and only one instance of it in the first eight hours or so of Raymond. Again, not unusual with tropical systems, where there is less temperature contrast from the ground to the cloud tops than with other types of storms. On the other hand, in the later stages of the Raymond event, the atmosphere did destabilize enough to get some strong thunderstorms. Two of them produced small hail in Pagosa, the first of which even led the NWS to issue a special weather statement. There was enough hail in that one that I could still see accumulations of hail along U.S. 160 about halfway from my house to downtown Pagosa when I drove down to get the flood pictures and videos above. Here is a picture of that storm as it approached from the southwest:
As I was driving home from downtown, the next storm was approaching, so I stopped and got a picture of it, too.
As bad as things were in southwest Colorado, the same two storms caused far greater damage and a number of fatalities in Mexico. Here is a Link to a CNN report on deadly Mexico floods from these same two storms.
One More Storm, October 15
The precipitatioin from remnants of Tropical Storm Raymond ended early the morning of Tuesday, October 14. But that was not quite the end of a nearly week-long period of very stormy weather in southwest Colorado. In the wake of Raymond, a longwave trough and Pacific cold front, of a nature more typical for fall in Colorado, was approaching from the west. With sunshine and warming temperatures, along with leftover moisture in the air from the recent tropical systems, this system had a lot to work with. CAPE, a measure pf atmospheric instability, was forecast to be around 1000 the afternoon of October 15. And wind fields in the atmosphere would be strong, with plenty of wind shear. Once the front moved into this environment, strong storms would be likely. The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) had much of Colorado and New Mexico in a Marginal Risk (Level 2 of 5) for severe weather, including even an outlook for a 2 percent chance of tornadoes within 25 miles of a location in an area of southern CO and northern NM centered roughly on Pagosa Springs. Storms were expected to form over the mountains north of Durango, then spread east and backbuild to the south, reaching Pagosa late in the afternoon. This unfolded pretty much as the models predicted, so I headed out l to Veterans Memorial Park for a look shortly after 3 p.m. A strong storm had formed near Navajo Lake and was tracking NNE. However, as it got closer it weakened, and there was no CG lightning. Eventually, though, more storms formed to its south and strengthened rapidly. It looked like these storms would pass near or southeast of Pagosa, so I used mostly back roads to re-position to Echo Canyon Lake southeast of Pagosa. The storms were mostly in a line by the time I got there, but the northernmost one, which was closest to me, intensified and separated somewhat from the rest of the line. This storm recieved multiple special weather statements, including one for wind gusting to 50 mph and nickle-sized hail for the area including U.S. 84 from just north of the NM state line to about the location of Echo Canyon Lake. Courtesy of the Pagosa Weather group, a radar image of this storm at 5:05 p.m., along with the text of the special weather statement around that time, can be seen here. At the lake, the storm to my SSW, which seemed to be moving more or less toward me, went through an intensification cycle sometime around 5 p.m. that included the formation of some rising scud under the updraft and a barrage, for 3 or 4 minutes, of cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning in the precipitation core just north or NW of the updraft. Using my Lightning Trigger, I was able to capture a couple of these:
Before long, the CG lightning stopped, although there was still plenty up in the clouds. And it was evident that the storm would be hitting my location very soon. Since this was my first chase in my new Chevy Blazer EV, I most decidedly did NOT want to get caught in any hail, so I called it a chase and headed home, this time through downtown Pagosa Springs. If it looked like I was clear from the storm there, I wanted to make a quick stop at a grocery store to pick up a couple things. That appeared to be the case, though the edge of the heavy precipitation was less than a half mile away. As I got out of the car, I was greeted with this double rainbow:
You can even see some of the rainbow in front of the trees on Reservoir Hill. When I got back out of the store, an entire rainbow was visible. I though this made a nice ending to a historical period of storms and floods in Pagosa Springs.
The cell that passed over our house from this line of storms while I was out chasing was relatively weak, and we only got another 0.11" of rain. That brought our total in 6 days to 5.24" - more than double the average amount for the entire month of October, which is one of the wetter months in Pagosa. While this storm did not bring enough rain to cause additional flooding in Pagosa Springs, it was another story to the southeast, where between about 5:30 and 8:00 p.m., the line of storms trained repeatedly over the same areas in the southeast and far east-central parts of Archuleta County, promting one final flash flood waring for that area, mainly for the Blanco and Navajo Rivers and their tributaries.
