Windy Weather: July 13, 2024 storms impact a wide area

Editors’ note: We are aware that similar storms impacted the Tri-State region from North Dakota to Nebraska and from Montana to Minnesota last weekend, to an extent beyond the scope of one article. We know that many people in our readership are struggling with the effects of extreme weather this year, from drought to wind to flooding to fires. If you have a story you’d like to share, please email us at editorial@tsln-fre.com. We thank you.

Montana

The National Weather Service out of Billings, Montana, reported severe thunderstorms across the southeastern part of the state on the afternoon and evening of Saturday, July 13, 2024. The report stated that storms initially occurred as discrete supercells before evolving into a linear mode when reaching the Montana/South Dakota border. Custer, Fallon, and Carter counties all reported extensive wind damage from uprooted trees to snapped power lines. No fatalities or major injuries were reported from these storms.

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Storms hit the Miles City area around 7 p.m.

In Miles City, reports and pictures showed hardwood trees completely uprooted or snapped off. Power poles were down, roofs and shingles were blown off of structures. Most of town went without power for much of the night into Sunday. Power poles were completely snapped off across Carter County. Crops were beaten down, and barns and storage sheds were torn apart.

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National Weather Service states that “Straight line winds are the main culprit. While the damage is extreme, there is no evidence that a tornado occurred in these storms. Microbursts could have easily taken place within the storms, but there is no way to confirm this either. While observed gusts were strong, the damages indicate more powerful winds occurred within these storms that would be estimated 80 to 100 mph. The highest observed gust was 79 miles per hour at Baker.”

Custer-Gallatin National Forest posted roads closed due to fallen trees in the Sioux Ranger District, and asked visitors to stay out of the area until damages could be properly assessed.

Custer County Farm Service Agency Executive Director Connie Hjorth said that the emergency board will meet on July 22 to discuss storm damage across the county.

“Town itself got hit the hardest,” she said. “There’s lots of corn damaged and some outbuildings. A lot of farmers in the Kinsey area really got nailed.”

Chad Sutter and his family live north of Miles City, Montana. He was in town having dinner with his wife and daughter Saturday evening.

“I looked over to the north where our house is and saw a massive, dark black cloud heading our way at a pretty good pace,” he said.

The family hurried home to get things secured.

“About 20 seconds after we got things put away and shut the garage door it hit,” Sutter said. “The wind was just ferocious.”

Sutter’s neighbor, Patti Blaquiere and her husband were out haying when the storm hit. Their weather station recorded the wind at 94 miles per hour. The Miles City airport, which Sutter can see from his house reported 70-72 mile per hour wind gusts.

“The house was ok, but it buckled in the big door of the garage and broke windows out of a shed,” he said. “I’m in the middle of a siding project, and it tore the foam off the walls.”

Sutter has some small sailboats that he uses to teach kids how to sail, and a trailer holding several boats was lifted up and thrown over a fence into his daughter’s 4-H pigs’ pen.

“The pigs were in their shed and they were fine,” he said.

The boats fared worse.

“It tore up a lot of trees, snapped some off six or eight feet above the ground. We’ve got quaking aspens on one side of the house and it blew hard enough that it bent them over. A lot of the old cottonwoods in the parks [in Miles City] blew completely over, and the parks were full of broken branches and limbs. A wooden play structure in the soccer complex on the northeast side of town got picked up, tied in knots and busted to pieces.”

Miles City lost power for most of the night and into Sunday; some people were out until Tuesday.

When Sutter’s phone started going off with the storm warnings, he looked at the radar.

“The storm cell looked like it was reaching all the way from Wolf Point to Miles City. It was one massive storm,” he said. “When we were getting the wind here, my brother-in-law in Circle was getting half-dollar size hail.”

Sutter said the worst of the sustained high winds lasted around 20 minutes.

“It felt like a wall of wind hit,” he said. “Everything blew in one direction. I have stuff from my neighbors’ in my yard, part of their roof in my pasture. Some of my stuff is in the neighbors’ down wind. It was exciting.”

Sutter works as a plan reviewer for the state building code department.

“We tell people to design their buildings to withstand 115 mile per hour winds,” he said. “Ninety-four miles per hour is getting pretty close.”

South Dakota

“As the evening progressed, the cluster of supercells moved southeastward out of Montana, merging into a line of significantly severe thunderstorms that brought destructive winds to much of western and central South Dakota,” according to the Rapid City National Weather Service. “Widespread measured wind gusts of 80 mph or greater were recorded from near the Montana/South Dakota state line eastward to near the Missouri River, with the highest gusts of over 100 mph observed in Butte County. The Storm Prediction Center classified this line of storms as a derecho, a term reserved for especially widespread, long-lived, and significant wind storms.”

Justin Weiss was out chopping silage when the storm came through the Maurine, South Dakota area, where he and his family operate Pine Creek Angus Ranch.

“I was sitting in the chopper and all of a sudden I couldn’t see two inches out the windshield,” Weiss said. “I grabbed the seatbelt because I wasn’t sure where we were going. It’s a pretty heavy machine and it was rocking and shaking like it was going to go somewhere.”

It was dark so he couldn’t see anything. When it let up a little he jumped out of the chopper and got in his pickup. A few slushy drops hit, and he figured it was going to hail.

“‘Oh, here it comes,’ I thought, but it didn’t hail. It would have been bad if there had been hail with all that wind.”

They did get a fair amount of rain, but Weiss wasn’t sure on the exact amount.

“I don’t know how much would have hit the rain gauge with the wind,” he said.

When the storm let up, he discovered that it had moved shipping containers around the yard, buckled shop doors, moved a semi and trailer loaded with alfalfa silage, and picked up an aluminum truck rim.

“The rim was sitting by the shop door, and we found it lying about 200 feet west of the shop,” Weiss said.

The wind was out of the northwest, so it was hard to guess how the rim went that direction.

“It was by far the most wind I’ve ever been in,” he said.

Quentin Gerbracht lives west of Maurine.

“When that storm hit, it sounded like a freight train coming through the house,” he said. “It didn’t ease into it at all.”

The storm hit Cedar Canyon Bible Camp, just a few miles west of Gerbracht’s. The camp is located in a deep draw, and hosts children for three weeks every July. Gerbracht was surprised at how much damage the storm did at the camp.

“There were a lot of trees down, and not many that didn’t have the tops broken out,” he said. “The community really came together and cleaned it up Sunday. We had people from all over come to help clean it up: Bison, Union Center, Faith. The close people came with equipment and others came with chainsaws. I don’t know how many loads of trees and debris we hauled out. We were pretty thankful it hit when it did and no kids were hurt.”

Gerbracht and his family were in the house when the storm hit around 9:30 p.m.

“We didn’t know at the moment, but it picked a grain bin up, slammed it into my son’s car, rolled it over top of my wife’s car and slammed it into the house,” he said. “Sunshine’s car and the grain bin were totaled.”

Gerbrachts were in the process of getting the old Maurine Garage fixed up and had just put a new roof on the building last fall, added spray foam insulation and fixed up the doors.

“It demolished the Maurine garage that’s been there forever,” he said. “It pushed in the doors, picked the new roof up, tore the whole back wall off.”

When the roof came off, it landed on Owen Johnsons’ car.

Gerbracht said he lost five sections of windbreak, some laid down with the northwest wind, and some laid down the opposite direction. Their yearlings blew out through the fence and into the neighbors’ pasture, and hay bales went through multiple fences.

“I have never seen it play with as many hay bales as that before, it was like a game of marbles,” he said. “It rolled my hay bales through the fence into the neighbors’ and rolled the neighbors’ bales into our fields. It took one hay bale, rolled it over and set it on top of my disk. I guess it thought I needed more weight on the disk.”

Gerbracht had several old culverts on the place, blocked in so they couldn’t roll around. They found the culverts two and a half to three miles away, in three different spots.

“They had to have been sucked up in the air to get out of where I had them,” he said. “It was definitely a different wind. When it hit, you couldn’t see our garage just in front of the house.”

Sunshine and Quentin Gerbracht photos, Maurine, South Dakota