Blustery storm topples trees
<p>Evergreen Fire Rescue and Flathead Electric responded to a downed power lines on U.S. 2 in Evergreen Sunday night. Traffic was temporarily blocked on all lanes. (Brenda Ahearn/Daily Inter Lake)</p>
<p>Sunday night's storms caused a large pine tree to fall on several vehicles at a house on Fifth Avenue West in Kalispell. </p>
Around 5,000 Flathead Electric Cooperative customers lost power Sunday night after high winds and lightning swept through the Flathead Valley.
“We had trees on power lines all over the place,” said Wendy Ostrom-Price, the utility’s spokeswoman. The initial storm roared through at around 8 p.m. and the peak of the outages lasted for a couple hours.
Flathead Valley fire departments responded to 21 power-line emergency calls starting at 8:15 p.m. Sunday.
As of Monday morning, about 200 electricity customers still were without power, but by afternoon, power was mostly restored.
“Crews were working all through the night and they will be working through today with cleanup and making repairs,” Ostrom-Price said Monday.
The most concentrated outage occurred in the Many Lakes and Echo Lake area, the result of a tree coming down on a transmission line with impacts on two power substations.
In Kalispell, an 80-foot-tall pine tree was toppled on Fifth Avenue West, crushing a Corvette and also damaging a truck, a car and a boat.
The storms packed wind gusts of up to 39 mph, although precipitation amounts varied.
Glacier Park International Airport measured .01 inch of rain, Kalispell received .1 inch, Pleasant Valley west of Kalispell received .6 inches and Noisy Basin east of the Flathead Valley received half an inch.
Wade Muehlhof, the Flathead National Forest’s public affairs officer, said there were 900 lightning strikes recorded in the Flathead, Kootenai, Plains and Condon areas overnight.
But there were only two fire starts detected on the Flathead Forest and they were stopped at less than an acre.
“Over the next few days we may see more of those,” Muehlhof said.
Rainfall varied across the forest. The Condon area got about three-tenths of an inch but the Spotted Bear area got no precipitation, Muehlhof said.