Utility battles 43 power outages

The Daily Inter Lake

Northwest Montana experienced widespread electricity outages over the weekend that affected more than 13,000 people. 

Wendy Ostrom-Price with Flathead Electric Cooperative said that her office received the first outage call on Friday night around 10 p.m. The last outage wasn’t resolved until 1 a.m. Monday. 

Low temperatures combined with snow, wind and downed trees caused the most trouble, Ostrom-Price said. 

A total of 43 different power outages were reported, affecting 13,374 members of Flathead Electric. 

“We really had outages from one end of our service territory to another,” Ostrom-Price said, adding that the outages stretched from Libby to the west, Big Mountain to the north and Lakeside to the south. 

The hardest-hit area covered West Glacier, Essex, the Canyon and Columbia Falls. 

It was the biggest storm in terms of damage and outages since a summer windstorm in July 2007, Ostrom-Price said. 

Ostrom-Price said that some people in Columbia Falls had no power for up to 18 hours, and in the West Glacier area it was longer than that. 

“We had temporary fixes in some instances,” she said. “There may be some residual effects, because sometimes you have to power down to make a repair.” 

Flathead Electric called in off-duty dispatchers, substation personnel and a couple of mechanics to work on its trucks, which also experienced some problems. It had 28 linemen working to restore power throughout the weekend.  

“The linemen were working in very dangerous conditions with hundreds of trees down,” Ostrom-Price said. “They’re working on lines when trees are falling down all around them.

“It was so fast and furious. Everybody stepped up to the plate.”