Wakefield gets new weather station

By CHARITY SMITH

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Wakefield — The city of Wakefield now has its own weather station installed at city hall. The city decided to have its own weather monitoring service after having to claim responsibility for sewer issues as a result of readings based in Ironwood.

“The big thing for this is that when we do our rain time, if we get 3.9 inches of rain in a 24-hour period or more and our sewer has a problem, it’s a county instance,” said city manager Rob Brown. “The problem that we have currently is that we have to use rain gauges in Ironwood, especially at the airport. So last year, you will all remember that we had that good storm that came in from Marenisco. We had a downpour here. It was dry in Ironwood. They didn’t get the downpour, but here we got pummeled. So our rain gauge that we use looked like we got one tenth of an inch of rain, where in Wakefield, we know we got more than that, so this will allow us to narrow that down somewhat.”

Brown told the council during its April 11 meeting that they still needed to make some modifications to the station. He said it has to be put a little bit higher up. He said that it was also installed between two bushes, so the wind measurement is a little off.

“We either have to get a bigger pole or dig out some bushes,” he said.

Wakefield residents are able to check the weather data online at tempestwx.com/station/72352.