A short but powerful storm blew through Grand Junction Thursday afternoon, leaving a path of downed trees, flooding and so much hail that it piled up like snow.
In only about 10 minutes, the storm system busted through the city’s record for rainfall within a 24-hour period — held since 1967.
Then, after about half an hour, it was pretty much over.
Tom Renwick, a senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service, called the storm “incredible.” The forecaster was at the agency’s office at the Grand Junction Regional Airport when the thunderstorm started to worsen around 4 p.m. Soon, wind was gusting as high as 64 mph.
“We couldn’t see more than maybe five feet out the door. It was remarkable,” Renwick said.
The weather service has received reports of hail up to an inch in diameter — roughly the size of a quarter — and Renwick has seen pictures of flood water reaching cars’ bumpers. Those kinds of intense storms are uncommon in the area, especially this early in the summer, he said.
To see an event like this in June, “when we've usually got high-pressure overhead and it's our driest month out of the year, that's very, very rare,” Renwick said.
Preliminary estimates from the weather service suggest the storm could end up being a once-in-a-century event, remnants of Tropical Storm Alberto — the first named storm of what’s expected to be a busy 2024 hurricane season — which made landfall in Mexico earlier this week.
City employees like Jerod Timothy knew some rain was in the forecast, “but nothing to that magnitude,” he said.
Timothy, who oversees stormwater and street maintenance as the city’s deputy general services director, said the storm inundated storm drains with water, debris and leaves that were knocked off trees.
In Timothy’s 18 years with the city, he’d never seen a storm roll in so quickly. The wind picked up, “out of nowhere,” he said. “As soon as the hail came, within minutes we knew that we needed to be out on the streets.”
He called in his staff, who were off after working on the city’s paving program. They immediately started scooping out drains and clearing mud and rocks from roadways. Some workers even directed traffic in areas without power.
Grand Junction’s team of arborists was out in force Thursday and will likely work overtime to clean up after the storm, said city forester Rob Davis. Their most urgent task was removing a large spruce tree that fell and blocked several lanes in the busy intersection at 12th Street and Patterson Road right as the afternoon commute was heating up Thursday.
Davis said the storm will create extra work for his crew, but said the city’s trees are generally healthy and strong and doesn’t expect many will be lost. So far, only one or two of the roughly 60,000 trees his department oversees appear destroyed.
“Having good people, having good equipment, having well-maintained trees for a lot of years, it does make it easier when you see the storms coming in,” Davis said.
Grand Junction is not out of the woods yet, however. The area is under a severe thunderstorm watch until 7 p.m. Friday and a flood watch until midnight Saturday.
