Wyoming
Wyoming family recovers wildfire losses thanks to community help
GILLETTE, Wyo. — Although the Short Draw fire has mostly been contained, the damage has been done.
Thousands of acres of land have been burned and livestock has been lost, but few have lost as much as Jesse Raymond.
The Short Draw fire destroyed his home on the Wyoming side of the border. Now, he just has his family and the clothes on his back.
Luckily, his small community has come together to help him and his family through these trying times.
It’s been a tough and long week for Raymond, his significant other, Cheyenne, and their three children.
“(It’s been) difficult, really emotional, trying to figure everything out,” Raymond said.
The Short Draw fire broke out Sept. 11, about five miles outside his ranchette home in northern Campbell County, Wyoming, about 10 miles south of the Montana border.
He and his family were the among the first to evacuate.
Cheyenne was the first to witness the fire.
Jesse Raymond
“Cheyenne looked up, and she could see the flames,” he said.
Just a few devastating hours later, they lost everything from their possessions, photos, to a ramp they built for their child back in July.
“Nothing really came out of it… the kid’s baby pictures that we don’t have anymore, all the, anything you could think of, they got burned down to the blocks,” Raymond said.
One thing they do have is community support. His work family at Big D Oil helped Raymond’s family stay in a hotel and started collecting donations from the community. One of his colleagues who’s been super passionate about helping is his regional manager, Joanna Robertson.
Jesse Raymond
“He’s not family, but he’s family. We’ll do anything for him, whatever he needs to get him back on his feet,” she said.
Some of his co-workers even came together to start a GoFundMe.
“Oh, the whole community came together. It’s amazing. It’s amazing how much everybody has jumped in to help us,” Robertson said.
Raymond and his family appreciate all the support from the community. To him, it’s all about those little moments.
“One of my boys, Levi, he’s a little cowboy, and someone dropped off a bunch of cowboy shirts, and this morning he had the biggest smile on his face, tucking that cowboy shirt in,” Raymond told MTN.
Jesse Raymond
Even though Raymond and his family are going through a rough patch, his community has his back throughout the entire ride.
“You talk about (help), but when you actually see it, it’s like a a totally different wavelength. It brings everyone closer, and I’m glad that that’s happened in my life,” he said.
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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