dpb wrote:
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. ...
I'll add a lot of the suffocation also comes when the herd up and try
to find shelter, they'll drift along w/ the wind and tend to head to
low spots like any gulleys or washouts that may provide some windbreak.
In high wind and snow that gets to belly high or deeper, it's also
easy for them to get down and then they're in real trouble. It's
virtually impossible for an individual to walk and stay upright in such
conditions, not much easier for them. The one single large loss I
mentioned was at a large feeding operation and I'm sure a lot of them
were in a particular lot or two and a bunch herded together and went
down.
A lot of the area, particularly E CO is open range. Most of W KS isn't
actually open range, but in such wind and snow, even barbed wire fences
are pretty much of no use once the snow drifts over them.
With the larger operations as here, though, there simply isn't any way
possible to have cover for thousands of cattle or even feasible to try
to collect them when scattered over large open range pastures. Believe
me, if there were any way, they certainly would as the economic loss is
sizable.
We are on the smaller end of operations running from 1-2000 head over
winter on wheat pasture depending on the year and have enough space at
the lots to accomodate roughly two-thirds that. Except for those on
rented pasture that may be upt to 20 miles away, we can usually manage
to bring most of ours into the corrals at the house if the forecast is
really dire. It's these kinds of decisions that are why I'm so
interested in truly localized weather -- the forecast for (and actual
event) even 30 miles away for this storm was drastically different than
for us.
Warning -- geezer story coming!!
The last blizzard here of this magnitude I went through personally was
'57. My brother and I were jr-high/early hi-school age. With our dad
we brought the cattle in off pasture to the corrals and finished the
morning the snow started shortly after noon. It was snowing heavily,
but no wind as we finished up unsaddling the horses, etc. out in the
barn, roughly 100 yards due east of the house. Just then, the wind hit
and went from near-calm to almost 60 mph in only a few minutes at
most--seemed instantaneous. Could see absolutely nothing, even your
hand at the end of your arm and barely able to stand leaning into the
wind. Dad tied the three of us together so as to not get separated and
we started off across the driveway to the house. We ended at the
chicken coop, having in that time traveled farther south than west,
even in our own driveway that we could have walked blind-folded from
directly to the yard gate! From that point we were able to follow the
yard fence and get back to the house. A few yards further south and we
would have missed any other outbuildings entirely and had a very
difficult time indeed in finding out precisely where we were. Could
have easily been lost on own farmstead. That one lasted from that
Saturday noon until late Monday before the wind abated. At that time,
we saw we had drifts that nearly covered the tops of 30-ft light poles.
That's about what this storm was for those in the brunt of it although
from what I've heard, it was more actual snow but not quite as strong
of winds.
End of geezer story...
