Stormy night topples trees, cuts power
Shari Courser examines the cottonwood tree that fell down in her back yard in Thursday night's storm. "It couldn't have fallen in a better place," said Courser. The tree, which Courser said she had considered getting rid of, missed both the house and a backyard gazebo.
About 6,000 electricity customers were impacted by power outages caused by thunderstorms that moved through the Flathead Valley Thursday evening, a Flathead Electric Cooperative spokeswoman said Friday.
“This storm was kind of different in that it didn’t cause just one or two outages,” said Wendy Ostrom-Price. “It was really kind of all over the place.”
High winds and lightning started causing outages at around 6 p.m., mostly in the North Valley, but there also were outages in the Bigfork and Swan Valley areas, Ostrom-Price said.
For some customers, there were only momentary outages, but others were without power for anywhere from one to seven hours, she said.
Most of it was caused by wind pushing trees and branches onto power lines, but in at least one case, lightning struck a tree, putting it onto a nearby power line.
Peak wind gusts at Glacier Park International Airport were measured at 37 miles per hour by the National Weather Service.
By Friday morning, most problems were corrected, but there were still some residual effects from the storm, Ostrom-Price said.
Despite the power problems, the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office had relatively few calls related to the storm.
There was a report of downed power lines near Montana 35 and Montana 206, and a sailboat was in distress off of Woods Bay on Flathead Lake. The people on board managed to steer it to safety.
One tree fell on a pickup truck in a driveway in Columbia Falls. Elsewhere around the valley, toppled trees caused a variety of damage.
West of Kalispell, high winds blew around some vendor tents at the site of this week’s Event at Rebecca Farm equestrian competition.
Course workers were up early Friday repairing banners affected by the wind, but the competition was unaffected.
“The show must go on,” spokesman Brian Schott said.
Now that the storm has passed, a hot weekend is ahead for the Flathead Valley.
The Weather Service predicts clear skies and a high temperature of 87 degrees today, becoming a little hotter at 91 degrees on Sunday.