OGDEN — The wind may have howled Thursday and Friday, but the storm packed a lot more bark than bite this time around.

A late-week windstorm saw gusts of up to 70 mph along the Wasatch Front north of Salt Lake City and around the Ogden area.

However, according to Eli Johnson — Weber County emergency management coordinator — the storm left very little in the way of damage.

“We got through really, really well compared to the last few of these that we’ve had to deal with in the last few years,” he said. “Very minimal  damage. (There was) some minor property damage — branches and stuff — for the most part. I’m not aware of anything significant or anything that our crews were required to respond to over the nighttime hours. Power outages were a bit of an inconvenience for a lot of folks and power companies were really just busting get those cleared up and taken care of.”

The Standard-Examiner reached out to Rocky Mountain Power to see how many outages were reported over the course of the wind storm and how many customers were affected, but no response was received by press time. However, according to the Rocky Mountain Power outage website, the Ogden area was down to just under 200 customers without power around 5:30 p.m. Friday.

Johnson said other damages were largely limited to downed tree branches and missing garbage cans.

Christine Kruse, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Salt Lake City, told the Standard-Examiner on Friday that the storm arrived in two waves.

“We saw almost two separate weather events,” she said. “We had the strong winds that came in (Thursday) morning and (Thursday) afternoon, and we saw even the Ogden Airport gust up to 60 mph. Then overnight and into (Friday) morning, we had downslope winds develop. Those peaked about 70 mph at Park Lane in Centerville and also in Brigham City.”

She said the NWS only received a couple of reports of downed trees in the area, attributing the low damage to the fact that the region has seen many of these storms, some with a greater intensity than this week’s.

“This area sees a pretty significant number of downslope wind storms,” she said. “It’s not like we were sitting in a situation where we hadn’t seen that in years and years and years.”

Kruse said more downslope winds were expected Friday night into Saturday, with these likely topping out around 55 mph.

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