REGIONAL- Mother Nature crammed three seasons into the space of a few days this past week, with the resulting snowmelt from summerlike temperatures, springlike rain, and another wintery blast of snow combining to create flooding conditions across the North Country and throughout St. Louis County and northeastern Minnesota.
A week’s worth of abnormally high temperatures reached a peak last Friday, topping the 70-degree mark, 25 degrees or more above the average normal high temperature for the day, causing heavy runoff from melted snowpack that measured between 70 and 80 percent of historic levels. The rate of snowmelt even surprised Duluth National Weather Service Meteorologist Ketzel Levens, who commented during a Friday weather update webinar.
“It has been rapid, it has been very drastic here even here at the National Weather Service,” she said. “We’re having problems kind of comprehending just how fast our snow has gone.”
Levens reported that on April 7, there was a widespread foot and a half or more of snowpack across the region, with areas that were upwards of 30-40 inches along the higher terrain and the North Shore here and 29 inches of snow depth at the NWS office.
But after a week of unseasonably high temperatures, the greatest portion of that snowpack had disappeared.
“Things have decreased rapidly in areas where we saw those highest amounts -- 35 to 40 inches have now decreased to 15 to 18 inches, and in some areas, we’re already getting down to a trace, or zero inches of snow depth. Here at Duluth, we went from 29 last Friday down to an inch this morning,” Levens said.
The melt was slightly less drastic in the Boundary Waters area, Levens said, with about five inches of snow-water equivalent remaining in the snowpack as of Friday. Levens emphasized that there was still plenty of snow remaining to melt in wooded areas.
Levens described the impact being seen from the rapid influx of water from the melt.
“We did have some closures of state and federal highways most of those have been pretty quickly resolved,” she said. ”But we continue to have just numerous local, city, town, and tribal roads that are closed, being washed out, especially if they’re gravel roads. Rivers have been coming up and out of their banks coming over roads hitting the bottoms of bridges, and we’ve got ponding of water on roadways across much of Northwest Wisconsin and it’s starting to get into parts of northeast Minnesota as well. We’ve got flood advisories for just about everybody at this point.”
A predicted storm front moved into the area on Saturday, bringing isolated thunderstorms and gentle rain throughout the day as the extent of the flooding was more widely felt throughout the county. In Cook, the Little Fork River breached its banks, flooding portions of Vermilion Dr. West and areas to the north, including Veterans Riverfront Park. The St. Louis County Public Works department closed roads in Sturgeon, Vermilion Lake, Kugler, Pike, Embarrass, and Waasa townships, with the bulk of road closures located in the southern portion of the county.
As of early Wednesday, the county was still reporting over 40 road closures, including these area closures:
Sturgeon Township
Bridge 640 on Murray Rd. (CR931) from Hwy. 22 to Gustafson Rd.
Anton Rd. (CR492) is closed from Hwy. 73 west to its terminus
Pike Township
Pike Rd. (CR 365) is closed from Hwy. 21 to Taylor Rd. (CR303)
Embarrass Township
Hayland Rd. (CR969) is closed from Hwy. 21 to Forest Rd. (969)
Waisenen Rd. (CR 362) from Palo Tia *CR 558) to Hwy. 21
Waasa Twp.
Kaunonen Lake Rd. (CR796) from Hwy. 21 to Salo Rd. (615)
The rain turned to snow on Sunday, with the storm dropping a fresh layer of a about five-and-a-half inches in Ely. Additional trace amounts fell there on Monday as well, but most of the snow had melted as of Wednesday.
The respite is projected to be short, however, as a new front moving into the area on Thursday is expected to bring “another messy spring storm” with a wintry mix turning over to snow on Friday and continuing through Saturday forecast for the North Country.
The updated NWS flood statement on Tuesday night had the flood advisory expiring on Thursday at 6 p.m., with a note that additional precipitation could “quickly result in a return to flood conditions” in the 10 counties covered.