Storm causes blackouts across Flathead Valley
By NANCY KIMBALL
The Daily Inter Lake
Thursday's fast-moving, powerful thunderstorm sent enough trees toppling and lightning bolts searing into power equipment to shut down electricity to some 2,700 homes and businesses in the Flathead Valley.
That's the best estimate from Stephanie Wallace, community affairs manager for Flathead Electric Cooperative. The outages were concentrated in the West Valley, but there were homes without power scattered throughout the region.
"It was so widely dispersed yesterday that the technicalities were challenging," Wallace said on Friday.
"Our priority was to keep crews safe, then focus on keeping members safe, then on emergency situations," such as a sparking line or the structure fire that broke out on Yodelin Ridge Road in Smith Valley, Wallace said.
The damage wasn't limited to the valley floor.
On public forest lands there were plenty of downed trees and wind damage, but lookouts and fly-over spotters reported only a handful of fire starts. None threatened to spread by Friday, but a few days of warm, dry weather could change that.
Crews from Montana Department of Natural Resources were checking Friday afternoon on what they guessed was a snag fire started by lightning in the Books Creek area about 40 miles southwest of Kalispell. It was spotted during an observation flight.
A Glacier National Park lookout reported a couple more fires Thursday night, one at Quartz Lake and another at Bowman Creek. But neither fire could be spotted during the day Friday.
The road to Spotted Bear Ranger Station south of Hungry Horse Reservoir was blocked on Friday with fallen trees, and branches and trees clogged the road at Middle Creek on Montana 206 between Badrock and Montana 35.
Fire activity is more of a concern elsewhere in the state.
A Kalispell support helicopter and its crew were dispatched to Billings Friday morning to help work three fires. The Heintz type-2 team will take over the 1,000-acre Coal Creek fire. Also near Billings, the Benedict fire was mapped at 600 acres and the Phipps Park fire was 172 acres Friday morning.
Back in the Flathead, crews worked into the night to restore power to darkened homes.
Wallace said about 1,500 homes were without power in the West Valley area until about 9:30 Thursday night. Crews started working in the Kila and Marion area and worked their way west.
It took until about 10:30 p.m. to restore power to homes near Browns Meadow, Ashley Lake and McGregor Lake.
Power came back on a bit earlier to the 600 homes served by the West Valley substations closer to Kalispell.
About 100 homes along Airport Road and near Foys Lake were without power for about two hours after the storm blew in shortly after 3:30 p.m.
Another 500 customers in Kalispell along Idaho and Main were without electricity for about an hour, Wallace said.
But some members of the cooperative were without electricity all night. Jackson Meadows in the West Valley came back on-line at 8:30 a.m. Friday after Flathead Electric got a call from a resident there, Wallace said.
"We're still working on some areas that we were not aware of last night," Wallace said late Friday morning.
"Lightning caused almost as many problems as trees," which blew down over lines and knocked out power, she noted. "It affected transformers, by either the voltage or the transformer itself being hit."
Cleanup of downed trees and branches in the power line right-of-way will continue for a while.
"We're working on it now," Wallace said. "I just talked to some linemen who said they are seeing impacts here and there. We're just clearing trees, being sure fuses that the lightning opened are being taken care of. We try for redundancy in the system so we can redirect power to get it to our members."
Every one of the cooperative's linemen were out working on repairs, each crew prioritizing which areas to attack first.
"We really hope members call us if someone in the home is dependent on life support so we can restore that area first," Wallace said. She also advised backup generators for such homes.
"We understand that outages cause inconvenience, but nobody is sitting back and saying, 'That can wait.' We just need to prioritize."