Wyoming
Shocking moment entire highway collapses after mudslide
A CATASTROPHIC mudslide caused a state highway to cave in completely.
The landslide occurred on Saturday morning at the State Highway 22 near Jackson, Wyoming.
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The Wyoming Department of Transportation warned drivers of the disaster.
“The roadway at milepost 12.8 on Teton Pass has catastrophically failed and a long-term closure is expected,” the National Weather Service office in Pocatello, Idaho said Saturday morning.
“No crews were hurt in the process, and no equipment was damaged. WYDOT is now reviewing a long-term solution and repairs.”
Construction crews had been working on creating a detour around the damaged area and removing asphalt from the road to reduce the weight on the unstable ground.
However, the landslide continued to shift, ultimately destroying the entire road.
SCRAMBLING
The landslide “breached the roadway with mud and debris, overwhelming the channeled drainage ditch and culvert,” the National Weather Service said.
“Crews are working on clearing the mud and debris this morning.”
“Everybody is mobilizing,” Teton County Commission Chairman Luther Propst said, per Wyofile.
“The county is considering camping options at the fairgrounds for Idaho commuters who work in Jackson Hole.
The Jackson Hole Mountain Resort is also exploring camping possibilities, and St. John’s Health will certainly need to adapt quickly.
“The buzz is it will be closed for several weeks or months.”
State Highway 22 connects the Jackson Resort region with communities around Victor, Idaho.
Wyoming State Highway 22 had endured two days of mudslides and landslides.
On Thursday, the area was temporarily closed after a landslide at milepost 12.8 caused eight-inch cracks in the road.
The buzz is it will be closed for several weeks or months
Teton County Commission Chairman Luther Props
The road was already closed due to a previous mudslide, so no vehicles or construction crews were present during the landslide.
Photos show the landslide took out both travel lanes at its widest point.
Officials have not provided a timeline for reopening the highway.
The closure has extended the usual 35-minute trip through Teton Pass to at least 1 hour and 35 minutes.
The longer commute is particularly challenging for Teton Valley residents who work in Jackson, where high home prices and living costs have led many to live outside the area.
The U.S. has reached out to Jackson police for comment.
Carl McDaniel, 65, from Washington state suffered broken bones after he was charged by a 2,000lb (900kg) bull during a visit to Yellowstone with his grandson on Friday. The encounter was recorded by Mike MacLeod, a professional photographer, who said the animal was ‘agitated, pissed off and charging anything and everything’
Wyoming
Wyoming authorities call on Rocky Mountain Power to explain role in massive November power outage
by Dustin Bleizeffer, WyoFile
The massive, multiple-utility power outage last fall that left some 250,000 customers across parts of Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana without electricity was the result of miscommunication and inadequate procedures during planned maintenance that required de-energizing a power line in southcentral Wyoming, according to a report.
The Nov. 13 incident left thousands of homes and businesses without power for 9.5 hours — longer, in some cases — and knocked out a coal-powered generator outside Glenrock. The unit at the Dave Johnston Power Plant remains offline, leaving Rocky Mountain Power to backfill some 300 megawatts of electricity — enough to power about 225,000 homes.
Without expressly assigning blame to any one party, the report — conducted by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation — indicates a series of communication breakdowns between PacifiCorp (parent company of Rocky Mountain Power), the Western Area Power Administration and, to some degree, electrical grid coordinating teams.
While it’s unclear whether authorities such as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation might pinpoint fault and assess penalties, the Wyoming Public Service Commission has called on Rocky Mountain Power to appear at a hearing scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Wednesday. The commission wants to hear from the utility about “the specifics and details of the event and report,” a public notice announced, and it “may consider and take any action that is in the public interest.”
The hearing at the Public Service Commission’s office located at 2515 Warren Avenue, Suite 300, in Cheyenne, will also be livestreamed at this link.
What happened
According to the 49-page report published in June, PacifiCorp and the Western Area Power Administration were coordinating maintenance on their respective systems that, together, required temporarily de-energizing PacifiCorp’s Aeolus–Clover 500 kilovolt line, which runs east-west and is anchored, in part, by a substation near Medicine Bow.
The effort also required curtailing some local wind energy from feeding the grid, according to the report. But on the day of the planned maintenance, Nov. 13, there was confusion about whether the Western Area Power Administration would scrap its work, so wind energy wasn’t curtailed as originally planned.
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Wind turbines near Cheyenne poke into a colorful sunrise in January 2025. (Tennessee Watson/WyoFile)
The report indicates that modeling tools might have failed to accurately measure local grid conditions, so when the power line was de-energized, “power flow rapidly redistributed throughout the northeast portion” of the local grid. “Within six seconds,” according to the report, “an electrical island formed and collapsed, causing widespread effects across that portion of the interconnection.
“The disturbance,” the report continues, “culminated in the loss of more than 4,800 [megawatts] of generation from coal, natural gas, photovoltaic and wind resources.”
The cascading power failure began at about 12:45 p.m. on a Thursday, dragging down portions of service territories operated by Rocky Mountain Power, Black Hills Energy, Montana-Dakota Utilities and some rural electric co-ops.
The report points to failures in communication, process deficiencies and inadequate modeling tools. Wind energy was not “identified as a contributing factor,” according to the report. It credits both battery storage and wind energy throughout the impacted area for supporting “a faster frequency recovery across the interconnection” and for providing “readily available capacity during system restoration.”
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
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