More than three inches of rain had poured down on Cortez as of 8 a.m. Thursday in the month of October.
Local weather expert James Andrus says that’s 291 percent of October’s historic average and it does not even include the heavy rain that fell later on Thursday. Nearly one and a half inches of the three inches fell on Wednesday.
The remnants of a storm in the Pacific brought tropical moisture and wild weather to the Four Corners, including major flooding in Utah and golf-ball-sized hail and a tornado in Arizona.
But the good news is Cortez has now moved from extreme drought, which was its status through the summer, to moderate drought, which is two categories above extreme drought.
Joe Theine, who has been CEO of Southwest Health System in Montezuma County since July 2023, is moving on. The Durango Herald reports that Theine will begin work as president of CommonSpirit Mercy Hospital in Durango on Dec. 7.
Theine took the reins at SHS just after it announced and then rescinded a controversial closure of the birthing center at Southwest Memorial Hospital.
Under Theine, the hospital finished 2024 and 2025 with positive income after three years of losses.
In June of this year, Becker’s Hospital Review named Southwest Memorial as one of its top 100 critical-access hospitals and top 100 great community hospitals of the year.
However, like many rural hospitals, Southwest Memorial faces major challenges. As cuts to Medicaid and to tax credits for the Affordable Care Act implemented under federal legislation kick in, SHS is expected to see an average reduction of nearly $10 million in annual revenues by 2033.
In June, Theine told the Montezuma County commissioners that at the end of 2024 about 85 percent of Colorado’s rural hospitals were not financially sustainable and that Mercy and Animas Surgical hospitals in Durango were seeing some of their worst financial years in a long time.
