South Dakota Remembers Lessons From Winter Storm Atlas

(TNS) – Tens of thousands of cattle lying dead. Snow drifts more than five feet high. People walking down the middle of once-busy streets.

Remembered by many names — Winter Storm Atlas, The Cattleman’s Blizzard, The Great Blizzard of 2013 or The Shutdown Blizzard — the historic weather of Oct. 3 through 5, 2013 , was a seminal event in South Dakota history, forever changing the landscape of life in the region.

Unseasonably cold air from Canada and a moisture-laden storm from the Rockies collided over western South Dakota , bringing rain on Thursday, Oct. 3 , before changing to heavy, wet snow Friday morning. Accompanied by wind gusts as high as 70 miles per hour, conditions deteriorated quickly — an early season storm that caught much of the area off guard.

“It was actually 85 degrees on September 30 ,” said Susan Sanders , the former warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Rapid City . “We were still issuing severe thunderstorm warnings. People can’t say they weren’t warned, but I don’t blame them for being skeptical about that bad [of] a storm that early.”

More than 50% of the state was under a no travel advisory during the storm, and in the aftermath, some remote locations remained without electricity for more than two weeks, according to South Dakota Response.

“The leaves were still on the trees, and so that heavy, wet snow weighted down the branches and leaves, that’s why there was so much tree damage,” Sanders said. “Then on the plains, where the cows were when it started raining and then got cold, they got hypothermia, and that was a cause of death for a lot of them.”

Previous reporting by the Journal indicates an estimated 43,000 head of livestock were lost. Clean-up in Rapid City took months with the assistance of $2.35 million in aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency .

Sanders herself was stuck at home for several days, thankful for the generator they’d purchased after a blizzard in 2000. Those meteorologists who were at work when the storm hit stayed for several days, working around-the-clock with local partners to disseminate updated information. Atlas came shortly after the NWS began using social media, Sanders said, the first big event they shared with their followers.

The reaction of a former meteorologist — the one who issued the blizzard warning for Atlas — still stays with Sanders to this day.

“He said, ‘I felt good when it started, because we were right, but I felt bad, because I knew what was gonna happen,'” she recalled.

More snow fell in Rapid City than any other October day on record — 19 inches on Oct. 4 — plus an additional four inches Saturday, bringing the total to 23.1 inches for Winter Storm Atlas. That’s the second-highest three-day snowfall total in Rapid City history, and the highest monthly snowfall total for October, according to NWS records. Other areas in the Black Hills saw incredible totals as well: 58 inches fell at Bear Ridge , about eight miles west of Spearfish ; 55 inches in Lead ; 32 inches in Belle Fourche ; 25 inches in Oglala ; and 19.2 inches in Sundance.

As the snow melted, flash flooding became the next threat, further hampering clean-up efforts.

‘One of the toughest days in my life’

As the forecast began to worsen, Les Shaw and his family took off on four-wheelers in the dark.

Shaw, a fourth-generation rancher, owns and operates Shaw Ranch in White Owl , an unincorporated village in east-central Meade County . He remembers the panic setting in as they raced towards their herd, trying to move as many head of cattle as they could in the dark and rain.

“If we hadn’t got those moved…I don’t want to think about what the result of that [would have] been,” Shaw said.

Rain was falling — around an inch-and-a-half, he estimated — before turning to snow, which blew 50- to 60-miles-per-hour until Sunday morning. Then the sky was beautiful, the sun shining, illuminating the devastation left behind.

“That was a tough one. That’s one of the toughest days in my life,” Shaw said solemnly. “I’ve never seen that many dead cattle in my life. I hope never to. I don’t.”

The Shaws were fortunate — minimal losses, he said — but he couldn’t explain why other’s cattle in similar shelter to his weren’t so lucky. He recalled just how much death he’d seen, from cattle hung in the fences to those lying lifeless in watering holes and ditches.

“There’s tears for a year. They think about it and it makes a grown man cry,” Shaw said. “I know there were some tears of mine shed when I found mine and they were alright.”

What made Atlas so different was its duration, he said. The prolonged exposure and soaking rains had a devastating effect on cattle that had yet to hair up for winter. If they stayed in shelter, they lived, but if they went on the move, the exhaustion of moving through mud while sucking moisture in constantly proved fatal.

“I think the reason why they did take off is the cows had the calves on them. At the time it was so early, and the calves are what left — because the cows won’t leave shelter, generally. I think they followed their calves and I think that was their undoing.”

In the immediate aftermath, Shaw many times fielded the question “why weren’t the cattle protected in a barn?” It’s unrealistic, he said.

“There’s no way that a modern-day rancher can barn all of his livestock. You just do not have that kind of a facility…it would take a civic center to put one herd in,” Shaw said. “It hurts my feelings that people think we don’t care and that we may be lazy and neglecting the animals. It just couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Shaw was in his mid-40s at the time and still working alongside his father. Both of them had seen a lot, he said, and neither had been terribly concerned before the storm because of the warm temperatures.

All of that changed with Atlas.

“Oh, it definitely has led to a lot more caution on my side,” Shaw said when asked if the storm changed how he ranches.

‘Soccer is played in all types of weather’

It was like being in a car wash, remembered Darrell Shoemaker .

A small tent struggled against high winds and heavy, persistent rains as Rapid City Stevens hosted Pierre in boys soccer at Sioux Park on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2013 . It was the last year of club soccer in South Dakota , and it was the last regular-season game, so both teams were playing to determine seeding for the playoffs.

Shoemaker’s son was a sophomore on Stevens’ junior varsity team. Shoemaker himself was keeping stats — something he still does to this day — and operating the portable scoreboard.

“It’s rainy, it’s windy, conditions are horrible, so [I was] trying to keep the stat book close to the vest, and if there was something to record, just immediately making a notation [and tucking it back],” he remembered. “At the same time, we were all trying to hold the tent down.”

It might seem unnecessary to play in such conditions, but Shoemaker said they were determined to get set up for the playoffs.

“We learned early on with soccer that the old adage was, ‘soccer is played in all types of weather,'” he chuckled.

And play they did.

The JV team had won as the rain started, but conditions got worse for the varsity game. Shoemaker remembers the team scoring early on — thankfully, he said — before they began rapidly rotating players to try and give them brief reprieve. They would dry off the ball, which didn’t help much, and dry off the players, who were absolutely drenched.

By the end of the game, the rain had mixed with snow, leaving parents scrambling for their cars and Pierre’s players taking off immediately on busses that had been kept running.

Shoemaker and his family made it home and settled in, resigning to the “wait and see” so many South Dakotans are familiar with. The morning brought more snow, but nothing yet out of the ordinary, so Shoemaker’s son decided to go visit a friend.

“I said, ‘If you go to your friend’s, you’ve got to plan on staying there for like, you know, the next like day or two — do not come home, because the conditions are bad enough,'” he said. “Maybe a couple hours later, I get a call, and he had decided to come home, and by then he’d gotten stuck…he got stuck and ended up blowing the transmission because he was trying to get unstuck.”

When snow began to clear, the aftermath was immense. Shoemaker recalled trying to get up Fifth Street with his daughter, watching people walk in the middle of the road to avoid the drifts from side roads that had yet to be cleared. He likened it to “The Walking Dead,” calling it “surreal.”

Clean-up then began on a massive scale.

“I remember where our office was…as the days wore on, you could actually smell the smell of decaying wood from the fairgrounds…[it] was actually coming all the way over to Omaha [Street], there was just so many downed trees and branches that people had to clean up,” he said.

It was memorable, Shoemaker said, but not only for the game or the blown transmission.

Shoemaker has been the Communications Coordinator with the City of Rapid City since October 2014 . The position itself was created as a result of Winter Storm Atlas. Local officials saw a need for better communication with the public and between partners, so Shoemaker, who had been working as the West River Constituent Service and Outreach Director for then-Senator Tim Johnson , stepped into the role.

Creating the position was one of the positives, Shoemaker said, a direct result of the lessons learned from Winter Storm Atlas.

They now communicate with residents about street crew activities, preparations, and road conditions — which can vary wildly from one side of Rapid City to the other — but also act as a sounding board for communications from other agencies, like the National Weather Service or Fire Department .

“It’s heightening the communication all through the storm,” he said. “We try to communicate through traditional media, through social media, through our homepage…There’s emergency alert systems that people can get the app and go out there and be alerted to when there’s particular issues.”

‘What we’ve built is something to be proud of’

Dustin Willett sent the first-ever wireless emergency alert in the state of South Dakota during Winter Storm Atlas.

Willett is the director of Rapid City-Pennington County Emergency Management , a joint-powers agency that handles operations for the city and county. He was relatively new to the position in 2013, and remembers having plans in place, but not really imagining it could get as bad as it did.

“Utility companies, electric companies took them seriously. They were moving trucks and resources in from around the area,” Willett said. “So the utility companies did the right thing and prepared…the Weather Service called it; a lot of us didn’t pay as close attention as we should have.”

They had plans in place, but like many, were skeptical due to the warm temperatures. Willett recalled being up at 4 a.m. — when the decision-making process for closures generally begins — and thinking it was a storm, certainly, but said he “didn’t know that it was going to be the event that it was.”

“When we got to the point where the plows were not able to keep the roads open and emergency vehicles started getting stuck and not able to move, that was, for me, the big writing on the wall that went ‘we’re in trouble,'” he said. “I think that’s when the feel of the whole event changed from, ‘Hey, we’re just getting through a storm,’ to, ‘This is not normal.'”

For Deputy Director Alexa White , the moment she knew the storm was different came early Friday morning when she was awoken by thundersnow — something she’d never seen in the middle of the night before.

White stayed in the office from Thursday morning until Sunday, going home for just a few hours and returning for the aftermath response. Willett spent around 96 hours in the Emergency Operations Center , napping when possible. The only people working in the EOC were those in the Courthouse complex when Atlas hit — save for then- Rapid City Police officer Karl Jegeris , who actually snow-shoed in to the EOC, Willett recalled with a smile. Jegeris went on to become Chief of Police in June 2014 .

“Paralyzing” was the word he used to describe the storm. The mood in the emergency operations center — which at the time was in the County Courthouse — shifted with every call from trapped emergency vehicles and plows.

Operations were no longer normal. It’s “almost never” that first responders can’t get to a call, Willett said, but that changed for people calling 911 during Atlas.

“We’re like, ‘Okay, well, you’re gonna be stuck, because nobody can get to you. You are not going to be helped,'” White said. “They didn’t understand the, ‘No, nobody’s coming to help,’ so that was hard for people to deal with.”

Hard for emergency managers to deal with as well, Willett said, explaining they had to operate like triage, aiming to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people with the resources available.

“Sometimes there can be situations that are so grievous — that are so severe — that if we can’t get to them in time and with enough resources or people, we can’t be effective,” he explained. “So the really, really, really bad and the not-so-bad tend to not get a response, and the ones that we focus on are those where we can reasonably make a difference.”

At the time, the county had access to four tracked vehicles — four slow-moving, tracked vehicles — to cover all of Pennington County for police, fire and medical calls. There was a handful of house fires that saw no engine response, Willett said. First responders focused on getting people out rather than being able to save structures.

What bridged the gap in service was their ability to leverage a relationship with the Black Hills Snowmobile Club , at one point putting nearly 40 snowmobiles in service working in pairs to assist the community. Organizations like BHSC, as well as ham radio operators and four-wheel clubs, are invaluable partnerships when the chips are down, Willett said.

Willett likened their challenges to a “cage full of 800-pound gorillas.”

No one had ever thought of cattle as “debris,” White said, but with tens of thousands of carcasses strewn across the region, the removal became a high priority. During recovery, the City of Rapid City contracted with a debris removal company to collect fallen tree limbs people stacked in front of their homes. The problem, Willett explained, was that some people outside of city limits asked when their debris would be removed.

“Surrounding communities saw that happening and expected the same, and managing those expectations is hard,” he said. “When you do not live inside of a city, you shouldn’t have the same expectations of the services that are being provided inside a city.”

Beyond that was restoring power. Utility companies fix power poles and transmission lines, but the last section from a power pole to a residence is the owner’s responsibility. What caught people by surprise was finding out there was power to a pole but not their home, Willett said, and many didn’t have the disposable income to fund that significant repair. Those that did have the money also had to wrestle with the fact there are only so many electricians in the area able to actually complete the work.

The lessons learned from Winter Storm Atlas still affect operations across the county.

An immediate impact was the closer coordination and communication between organizations, White said, including tailored forecasts specifically for public safety operations, which she said helps enhance situational awareness. In their after-action reports, Willett and White met with members of the snowmobile club and similar groups to help figure out what they could do to be more effective — like knowing which gas stations could run on backup power to provide fuel during the response.

They also had to work out the basic communication between public safety and non-public safety.

“You need to maintain safety through accountability. I need to know where they are. I need to know that they’ve accomplished the mission that they were set out to do, and if they run into a problem, they need to be able to communicate back,” Willett said. “So, communication with non-public safety resources that were helping was problematic, and that was something we looked at afterwards.”

And communicating with the public via social media — just like the National Weather Service — was in its infancy during Atlas. Their presence on Facebook was small; RCPCEM only had a Facebook page for six months to a year at that point.

“We were really harnessing that power, I think; the first time of putting information out that way,” White said. “I think that people need to hear things multiple times before they start to believe it. If the Weather Service put up something…if they just hear it from them, they’re like, ‘Okay?’ but if they hear from us and they hear from the Fire Department — and everybody’s kind of amplifying that message — then there’s a better chance that people are going to take some preparatory actions.”

Many local departments began investing in tracked vehicles or removable snow tracks that can be installed on existing units. Willett estimates there’s two- to three-times as many tracked vehicles available in the area post-Atlas.

The Rapid City-Pennington County Emergency Management office is now on the ground floor of the County Administration Building , a couple blocks east of the Courthouse.

Previous emergency managers had set them up well for success, Willett said, but their new operations center was being built when Atlas hit.

“If somebody would have told me, ‘Hey, you’re gonna have a record-setting blizzard and all of this mayhem’…If that crystal ball would have told me that, I may have put some more money into [the existing EOC], or some more capability into the existing EOC,” he said. “But really, we were getting ready to move into this facility, so we were equipping this facility and spending the money over here to build this EOC out.”

Rapid City and Pennington County weren’t the only agencies who learned lessons from Atlas. At the time, FEMA would send a project specialist from somewhere in the country to help a community in disaster, working with local emergency management agencies on coordination and ensuring policies, procedures and meticulous record-keeping were being done so the community would qualify for reimbursement.

“This is a record-setting blizzard in western South Dakota , with massive agricultural livestock loss, and the person that FEMA sent to us was from Honolulu, Hawaii ,” Willett said. “So we had an individual from Honolulu, Hawaii , that was trying to wrap their head around feet and feet and feet of snow and drifts and record-setting snow and cold and putrescent [livestock] debris.”

That person quit FEMA shortly after arriving, he said.

“We broke our FEMA person,” Willett said. “We talked through that all the way up through the congressional level of, ‘Hey, this didn’t work well and it wasn’t anybody’s fault necessarily, but this process doesn’t set people up for success.'”

The process has since changed — a couple of times.

The blizzard of 2013 was an eye-opener for Willett, who explained he had to take a step back and come to the realization there was a lot about his job that he didn’t know. We learned a lot, he said, and neighbors helping neighbors solidified the kind of community Rapid City is.

‘An ounce of prevention’

Early October 2023 has drawn some coincidental parallels with Atlas.

The government was shut down during Atlas. A last-minute vote narrowly saved the country from another this past Saturday, at least temporarily. Although not as drastic as 2013, it was 82 degrees in Rapid City on Saturday (the average is 64.5 degrees) — and a cold front moving through Monday night is expected to drop highs into the 60s.

Thankfully — at least for now — snow isn’t in the forecast.

White said it’s the perfect time to begin preparations. They call it “blue-sky” — preparing before the hint of severe weather. It isn’t even just winter weather, they said. With South Dakota’s history of rapidly intensifying and changing conditions, having supplies for floods, fires and blizzards is a must.

She recommends asking what would be needed to survive at home for three days — medication, food, pet supplies — and making sure it’s on-hand. Don’t wait until the last minute. Have some propane or charcoal for the grill. Thinking of buying a generator? There’s only so many in Rapid City , she said, so get one before they become scarce. Those that travel to work should also consider a “car kit,” including food, water and warm clothes.

It can be expensive to buy outright. White said preparing ahead of time allows residents to spread the cost out. Add a couple cans of food to the grocery list each week, she said. Taking the time keeps a major hit off the household budget.

“The old adage of ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ is true,” Willett added. “The time and energy and effort and aggravation put into preparing is small compared to being stuck in a situation and not being prepared and having to deal with those consequences of not being prepared.”

Take the time to understand the equipment, too, he added, to avoid concerns like back-feeding electrical lines. Connect with reputable and official sources for information: the National Weather Service (weather.gov/unr or @NWSRapidCity on Facebook), Rapid City-Pennington County Emergency Management (pennco.org/em or @RCPCEmgMgmt on Facebook), and the City of Rapid City (rcgov.org or @CityofRapidCity). Pennington County residents can also sign up for public warning messages online on RCPCEM’s website. For more information on how to prepare for severe weather, visit pennco.org/prepare.

Ten years later, Atlas remains a stand-out event for many, just like the 1972 Flood or the 2002 Grizzly Gulch Fire.

Willett will remember the devastation, but also the response.

“The only way that a community improves its resilience — the only way a community recovers effectively after a disaster — is if they respond as the whole community; when everybody pitches in,” Willett said. “That was incredible for me to witness.”

Darsha Dodge is the City Editor of the Rapid City Journal . Contact Darsha at ddodge@rapidcityjournal.com.

___

©2023 Rapid City Journal, S.D.Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.