Storm slams Flathead
<p>A tree that fell into a home on Harmony Road in Evergreen caused some of the worst damage from a sudden storm Saturday night that also left 10,000 Flathead Electric customers without power.</p>
More than 10,600 members of Flathead Electric Co-op lost power Saturday evening after a brief but violent storm ripped through the valley.
“At about 6 p.m. we had this big storm come in from the southeast and we had trees through transmission lines at the Flathead substation on Whitefish Stage Road, and that impacted the Evergreen and LaSalle substations,” said Wendy Ostrom-Price, the power company’s public relations officer.
Ostrom-Price said that all of Flathead Electric’s crews began working as soon as the storm hit. Despite that full mobilization, however, she said some members would be without power through the night and into Sunday.
“Obviously, right now they’re working on restoring the bulk of the power to the main impacted areas — like Evergreen — and little by little they’ll go down the line and restore power,” she said. “We do anticipate some residual scattered outages.”
The bulk of the outages were in Kalispell, Whitefish and Columbia Falls, while Evergreen was the hardest hit.
“When storms come through like this, it’s best if you don’t have to travel because law enforcement officers and the crews are dealing with trees down everywhere,” she said. “If you see a line on the road, avoid it. Don’t cross it. Consider all downed lines live and energized.”
According to Dan Zumpfe with the National Weather Service in Missoula, Kalispell received .77 inches of rain in just 22 minutes Saturday evening, with only trace amounts falling after 6:40. Of that, .64 inches fell in just 10 minutes.
That pushes the total amount of rainfall in June to a new record at 5.73 inches. The prior record was set in 2005 with 5.66 inches.
“It was a very strong thunderstorm,” Zumpfe said. “The top wind speed gusts that we found, at Glacier (Park International) Airport, were 61 miles per hour.”