wrote:
On 4 Jan 2007 08:42:16 -0800, "dpb" wrote:

who are still w/o power and will be for two weeks or more. Plus, have
water for the livestock and feed and didn't lose 450 head to
freezing/suffocation as fella' one county north...


Where are you located?

Being a farmer myself, could you explain in more detail what happened
to these livestock. I can understand freezing, but why did they
suffocate? I find this very disturbing, since I absolutely love my
horses like family. If we ever got a bad storm like that, I sure
would like to know what to or not to do. Normally when we have severe
weather coming, I bring all of them into the barn. I dont have enough
stalls for all of them, but they just stay in the center of the barn
and irritate each other, but their little irritations, and a few
chunks of fur bit off, are far better than being out in bad weather.
Hopefully by the end of this year I will finally have a stall for each
one of them.

If there are web links from the news, about these animals and the
weather, please post the URLs.

Far SW KS. Cattle are subject to suffocation in heavy snow/wind from
nostrils becoming hard-packed with snow they can't get clear. This was
severe blizzard conditions of high snowfall rates combined with 40-50
mph winds for a period of 24 to nearly 48 hours in some locations.
Total numbers I've heard so far are about 1-2,000 head in KS, but
there's fear in SE and E CO of as many as 30,000 in serious jeopardy.
I've not heard hard counts as yet from there, but the Guards of both KS
and CO are still helicopter-dropping hay to stranded cattle. The other
serious problem now is, of course, water since most rural areas are
still without power and all water here is subterranean. They can get a
little by trying to eat some snow, of course, but by now it's frozen
solid with some thawing and then the hard freezing over night and in
many places covered by inch or more of ice so can't get sufficient
water for a longer term that way.

We were in the freezing rain band for most of the duration as the front
essentially stalled and didn't move more the 40-50 miles from Friday
until it finally cleared here late Saturday. Even then, further north
and west where the worst was continued to get snow and wind from the
"backside" wraparound effect behind the low long after (like another 12
hours or more) it was already clear here. We had over 5" of
precipitation of which 2" or so was freezing rain, so you can imagine
what that would have amounted to in all snowfall and high winds. The
NWS total precipitation radar estimates had a maximums of nearly 12"
moisture when it was over. I suspect this was an over-estimate since
those areas were almost all snow rather than rain, but I have heard 8"
totals reported.

I don't have any specific URLs, but look for news stories on the
storm(s) of last two week(s) in CO and KS. I've not looked to see what
sort of coverage the Denver Post gave to the second storm that mostly
bypassed them after the Christmas week bullet on the airport, but would
be a start. Wichita Eagle, Hutchinson, (KS) News, Garden City and
Dodge City, KS, Lamar and LaJunta (CO) are possibilities. We take the
Wichita paper and they've had some coverage, but certainly not on the
details of the livestock operations although do mention numbers and
general problems. Not had the newest High Plains Journal, a weekly ag
paper to see what their coverage is, but their site is at www.hpj.com
and might be of some interest anyway.