Greetings and welcome!
We had some heavy weather come through the area yesterday and last night. As the first wave approached I was watching the live TV weather updates.
They had tornado warnings from Antigo to the Oconto Co line. There was a classic bow echo and inbound and outbound winds on the radar were very close and very strong. Then the radar started showing rotation.
I evacuated when the storm was about 10 miles away and bearing down on the area. It was not bad here or at Rapids Resort. We had a couple of gusts, a lot of thunder and lightning, and a lot of rain really fast, but no heavy weather. One neighbor had a big tree come down, but so far that is the extent of damage reports from Silver Cliff.
Reports at the bar had a lot of damage about 10 miles south of Silver cliff. They said that Thunder Mountain Ranch got hit and Caldron Falls Rd north of there had trees down. Apparently Ranch Rd got hit and had trees down, and the damage continued down to the Twin Bridge Area near Hwy X & Parkway, There was damage north of there, but between X and the Curve Inn (Trixie’s) there was a lot of damage. Popp’s Resort got hit and they had a lot of trees down, and some caused car and building damage.
The storm continued east and hit Crivitz. They had trees down and the power was out. One unconfirmed report said that Hwy 141 even had trees down at one point.
There are damage reports from Maple Heights Campground just south of Townsend with trees coming down on some people’s stuff. Some ATV riders ran into a lot of trees down near Mountain.
A friend on Hwy W between Parkway and Caldron Falls Rd had a lot of trees down.
Wausaukee, Athelstane, Twin Bridge, and Crivitz all had power outages. Some will take a while to restore with a lot of trees in the way and plenty for the line crews to do. The morning news said something like 40,000 people were out of power. A news report out of Minnesota said that the same storm knocked out power for about 130,000 people there.
Closer to home the only real damage here is the runoff just destroyed the driveway hill with erosion. That is going to take some work to fix, but I still have it a lot better than a lot of people to the south of here.
We had a couple of subsequent waves of the storm come through after dark. The radar was ugly with orange, red, and black. Those storms brought a lot of rain and non-stop lightning, but no heavy weather.
E-mail me at ray # northerndestinations.com if you want me to check on your place. I am stranded at the moment, the water pump on the car went out, but if all goes well I will be back on the road before sunset.
People asked if it hit the Peshtigo River watershed. It sure did. According to radar return based estimates most of the watershed saw 2-3”. The river was at about +15” before the storm. A neighbor reported that the river was coming up immediately after the storm, and has continued to do so this morning. The gauge is off-line, so I have to guess at current levels. I would expect it to be close to +20” and rising fast. By mid-week we should easily see +24-30”.
I will update with any more information that comes in about the storm as I get it.
RJB