State Briefs

City recognizes Cheyenne man for life-saving efforts during blizzard

CHEYENNE (WNE) – Cheyenne city officials on Monday recognized a man for saving the life of another man who could have frozen to death during the city’s recent blizzard.

During a short ceremony and with his family looking on, Miles Quisenberry received a certificate for his March 14 actions from Mayor Marian Orr and Police Chief Brian Kozak.

Quisenberry had gotten up early that day. The wind howling, and it was very cold. According to city officials, Quisenberry left his house on O’Neil Street around 6 a.m. and drove south, but instead of taking his usual route to work, he made a left turn on West Seventh Street.

He was coming to a stop at an intersection when he saw a flash in the right rearview mirror.

“He shined a light thinking that I didn’t see him,” Quisenberry told Orr. “I saw him in my passenger mirror. I went back, and that’s when I saw him in one of the snow drifts.”

Quisenberry went to the man’s side, where he discovered the man was elderly, under-dressed for the conditions, and in snow drifts about 3 feet high around him.

Quisenberry helped the man stand and made several attempts to get him into his truck and out of the weather, but the elderly man said he could not feel his feet.

After placing the man in his truck, Quisenberry found out where he lived and backed up to the house.

Company wants to bring hail mitigation techniques to Cheyenne

CHEYENNE (WNE) —  A North Dakota company wants to bring its cloud-seeding technology to Cheyenne in an effort to mitigate hail damage from storms.

According to Cheyenne Mayor Marian Orr, Fargo-based Weather Modification Inc. seeks to base aircraft and storm teams at Cheyenne Regional Airport, starting with the 2020 spring storm season. The company hopes to use seeding techniques to decrease the size of hailstones in order to reduce damage to crops and property.

The company currently conducts cloud-seeding operations over the Snowy Range for the city’s Board of Public Utilities to order to increase snowpack.

A representative from Weather Modification was not immediately available for comment Friday. But according to the company’s website, cloud seeding, also known as weather modification, is the use of seeding crystals that enhance a cloud’s ability to produce precipitation.

In this case, crews would use aerial glaciogenic seeding techniques to induce excess supercooled liquid water that could potentially become hail to freeze into larger numbers of small particles, rather than much smaller numbers of large particles.

“It damages crops out in the county,” Orr said. “Even in the city, we have significant damage with our police cars and fleet - and everyone’s roofs.”

Orr said a team from Weather Modification, as well as representatives from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where the company conducts hail mitigation activities, are scheduled to make a presentation in Cheyenne during the first week of April.

The program would cost around $1.6 million a season, but Orr said plans do not call for the city to bear the cost alone.

Barrasso, Enzi back wolf de-listing bill

JACKSON (WNE) — Wyoming’s Congressional delegates are signing onto a bill to delist wolves in other states to fend off future lawsuits over wolves in this state.

Although Wyoming already manages wolves inside the state, Sens. John Barrasso and Mike Enzi have both signed on to a bipartisan bill introduced last week with a primary purpose of delisting wolves in the Great Lakes states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Wyoming’s inclusion in the bill is solely to ensure that the 2012 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delisting rule for wolves in Wyoming “shall not be subject to judicial review,” the bill states.

“Wyoming has successfully recovered the gray wolf and demonstrated its ability to manage the species,” Mike Danylak, a spokesman for Barrasso, said in an email. “The legislation creates certainty for the people of Wyoming by prohibiting further judicial review of the delisting determination.”

Wolf management in Montana and Idaho is already exempted from litigation because of a 2011 rider that then-Montana Sen. Jon Tester tacked onto a congressional spending bill. The Wyoming delegation has tried repeatedly to follow suit.

An appeals court decision in early 2017 returned the approximately 300 wolves that call the Equality State home to Wyoming Game and Fish Department jurisdiction. Canis lupus was in state control from 2012 to 2014, and then for three years were the only wolves in the Northern Rockies that were federally protected.