Heavy snow falls on Black Hills

A powerful snowstorm swept through the Southern Black Hills last week and left some locations with up to two feet of snow. In fact, this winter has been the second snowiest on record in Rapid City, but those historic totals, “depend on the region” said Aaron Dye, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service, Rapid City. The storm moved in to the area starting April 3 and was moving out by April 5.
Since 1910, the most snowfall Custer has received in a year was 98.9 inches. Currently Custer is looking at 47.2 inches for the winter, which Dye reports is just above our average of 44.6 inches.
“The region as a whole is above average,” Dye said, with many other areas breaking in to their top 10 snowfall years of the past century. As the Southern Hills dodged many of the earlier storms of the season, the snowfall from the past month has come as much-needed moisture. Currently, Custer has received a total of 4.77 inches of precipitation this year—above average.
The most snow fell in the far southwest portion of the South Dakota. The highest reported total was for two miles west of Hot Springs where they received a whopping 30 inches of fresh snowfall.
“[The Southern Black Hills] had the three highest snow totals in the area,” said Dye.
Moving northeast across the state, those totals start to dwindle, but still to sizeable amounts. Three miles northwest of Kadoka reported 13.7 inches,  Box Elder reported 12 inches and Sturgis reported eight inches.
“This was one of those events that was very prepared for. We knew it was coming,” said Dye.
Michelle Fischer from Black Hills Electric Co-op reported that there were “only a handful of outages” despite the severity of the storm. There were a few in the Hermosa area and one near Angostura.
Fischer said that at one point, crews had to wait for the road conditions to improve before continuing with maintenance, saying “it was unsafe.” During the height of the storm, I-90 was closed in the western portion of the state due to the unsafe blizzard conditions.
“All members were restored by 10:30 a.m. the following morning,” Fischer said, but that “the biggest one of our hurdles was road access to restore it safely.”
“We are always ready to restore power for whatever Mother Nature throws at us,” said Fischer.
“It goes to prove that doing right of way maintainance and inspecting is paying dividends,” said Fischer.
Custer County’s highways superintendant, Jess Doyle reported that the westernmost part of the county recieved the least snow, but in the eastern end, the lowest amounts were near Fairburn.
“It was a little deceiving because the snow was wet and heavy, so it settled really fast,” said Doyle. “I wouldn’t say there was one area that was necessiarly worse than the other. In the areas without trees we had wind issues Tuesday afternoon into Wednesday.”
Despite the wind and heavy snow, the roads were able to be opened up by the end of the day April 5. Doyle reports that even after the snow is cleared, it may still cause issues for roads in the area,
Because of thawing before the storm and because the warm weather following will melt it so quickly, there may be issues with potential flooding.
“Roads will have potholes because everything is so saturated. We will fix them as soon as we can as time allows,” said Doyle.