AURORA – A line of severe storms packing high winds and hail swept across Colorado’s Front Range and Eastern Plains Sunday, spawning several damaging tornadoes, including one that dropped down near a junior golf tournament southeast of Denver, weather officials said.
Seven tornadoes occurred, five in northeast Colorado and two in Park County in the center of the state, and three produced damage, the National Weather Service said on its website.
The band of storms made its way into central Nebraska and western Kansas between 9 p.m. and midnight Sunday, Weather Service meteorologist Frank Cooper said. The storms will stick around the area this morning before moving into Arkansas and Missouri.
In Colorado, one tornado touched down near the Blackstone Country Club, causing one minor injury and flipping an empty trailer, Aurora Fire Department officials said.
Paul Cleveland, 16, who was playing in the golf tournament, said he and two other people were riding a golf cart when they saw a funnel cloud heading in their direction, swirling debris.
“I ducked down, protected my head and waited for the worst,” he said.
Moments later, Cleveland said, the twister lifted the cart and threw it on top of a caddy walking nearby. The caddy, a man in his 50s, was taken to a hospital with minor injuries, said Capt. Diane Lord with the Aurora Fire Department. Damage was also reported to a construction trailer.
Even in La Plata County winds were giving some headaches.
Sunday’s blustery winds are said to be to the cause for minor blinking and scattered power outages for La Plata Electric Association customers between the Animas Valley and Lemon Reservoir. Strong winds brought down branches and even half of an old spruce tree in Bayfield.
Almost 700 LPEA customers in 20 separate locations were hit by outages. LPEA predicted problems with outages around 12:30 p.m. Sunday afternoon, and later in the afternoon power losses were reported. In addition, the co-op reported 2,000 additional customers were hit with blinks – power going on and off.
Winds also caused some lesser problems in southern La Plata County and Archuleta County, said Indiana Reed, a spokeswoman with La Plata Electric Association, in a news release.
Grace Sossaman, who has lived in the old Bay House in Bayfield since 1972, said Sunday afternoon winds knocked down the top half of an old spruce in her yard. She suspects a microburst.
Winds sheared about 50 to 60 feet from the tree, Sossaman said.
Sossaman said her daughter also reported lots of branches down along the Buck Highway (County Road 521).
Elsewhere in Colorado, several other tornadoes were reported Sunday, including one in the tiny northeastern Colorado town of Grover and two others in northern Weld County. A twister also touched down in a sparsely populated area of southeast Wyoming, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or major damage.
In Park County, two twisters caused damage. A funnel cloud touched down near Fairplay about 65 miles southwest of Denver at about 11 a.m., damaging the roof of a home, Park County spokeswoman Linda Balough said.
“This is amazingly unusual at 10,000 feet, very unusual for it to happen up here,” she said.
Another tornado was reported a short time later, about 40 miles away near Lake George, and caused “substantial” damage at an RV park, Balough said. No one was reported injured in either tornado.
Weather Service meteorologist Kyle Fredin said a trough of low pressure created a “large extensive line” of severe weather along the Front Range from southern Colorado to the Wyoming border.
Herald Staff Writers Brandon Mathis and Patrick Armijo and Associated Press Writer Thomas Peipert contributed to this report.
