Winds cut power to wide area
<p><strong>A large</strong> tree came down in the high winds around 12:30 in the morning on Wednesday, November 18, on Willow Glen Drive in Kalispell. The tree caused damage to both the vehicles belonging to Justin and Amber Timmons. According to Amber the tree initially hit the luggage case above her car and bounced down to roll over and damage the rear door. Once it slipped off her vehicle the tree continued down onto Justin's truck, something they had purchased only three months before. In spite of the damage the couple is counting their blessings. The tree fell very near…
<p><strong>Flathead Electric</strong> Cooperative linemen work on a downed tree on Montana 35 south of Bigfork Tuesday night. (Seaborn Larson/Daily Inter Lake)</p>
<p><strong>Waves batter</strong> a breakwater on the east shore of Flathead Lake Tuesday afternoon in Woods Bay as a storm bearing high winds roars into the Flathead Valley. (David Reese/Bigfork Eagle)</p>
Wild winds Tuesday night and Wednesday morning brought trees down that crushed two Kalispell vehicles and cut power to thousands of people across Northwest Montana.
Blustery winds gusted as high as 52 mph at Glacier Park International Airport, 66 mph in Polebridge and 64 mph in Hot Springs, according to the National Weather Service.
“We’ve experienced probably the most widespread outages we ever have,” said Wendy Ostrom Price, a spokeswoman for Flathead Electric Cooperative. “We’ve had outages that impacted more people in the past, but it’s been in more of a contained area. There is just hardly an area across our service territory that hasn’t been touched.”
As of 4 p.m. Wednesday, Flathead Electric had about 8,800 members without electricity across Northwest Montana. More than 1,200 homes and businesses were without power in Whitefish and the surrounding area, and another 1,200 customers were without power from Coram to Essex.
Ostrom Price expected outages to continue throughout Wednesday night and into today, noting that utility crews had been working around the clock and would continue to do so until full power is restored.
“A lot of times we’ll restore an area, everyone turns everything back on and it trips it again — sometimes before crews have even left the site,” she said. “It’s just a scramble right now.”
An estimated 12,000 Flathead Electric customers had been affected by 102 power outages from Tuesday night through Wednesday evening. Flathead Electric has 49,000 customers. Power lines were reported down from Libby to Essex and from Polebridge to Woods Bay.
The last time a similar event happened was during a winter storm in January 2010, she added, when about 80 outages affected 12,500 of the utility’s members.
Farther south, Mission Valley Power had 20 outages in its coverage area, which roughly mimics the Flathead Indian Reservation boundary and serves 21,000 customers.
“A lot of people woke up to a blinking alarm clock,” said Jean Matt, Mission Valley’s general manager. “It’s been a busy night and we are anticipating another busy night tonight.”
Willow Glen Road resident Amanda Timmons was awakened in the night after her husband heard a large crash during the howling wind. The wind had toppled a large tree that landed on top of her car and her husband’s pickup truck.
The pair were able to get their children to school on Wednesday morning with the help of their 17-year-old daughter, but Timmons and her husband were unable to make it to work because of the trees. They had to wait for an insurance adjuster to assess the damage before removing the tree.
Despite the damage, Timmons was grateful the tree fell the direction it did.
“I am just thankful that it did not hit my house because our boys’ bedrooms are right there,” Timmons said.
Wind troubles had fire departments across the Flathead Valley scrambling all night long: In one 12-hour period from Tuesday evening through Wednesday morning, fire crews were called to 51 powerline emergencies, and more calls kept rolling in as folks woke up to assess damage, Flathead County Office of Emergency Services Planner Nikki Stephan said.
Stephan said one dispatcher had to handle 45 calls at one time because of the overflow calls. Stephan said it is good for people to report downed powerlines to dispatchers if they pose a threat such as fire, but otherwise most of the downed lines should have only been reported to Flathead Electric Cooperative.
“If you have no emergency, because your power being out is not an emergency, or no life or property is in danger, don’t call 911,” Stephan said. “Contact the power company and advise of an outage.”
Stephan said that other than downed lines, the weather did not cause significant emergencies. She said this storm was less severe than one a couple of years ago when Evergreen Fire Rescue had to handle 150 downed powerline calls.
Stephan said that much of Flathead County seemed to be spared by winter weather that had been expected to follow the wind.
“I think we are doing pretty good so far,” Stephan said.
Bigfork Fire Department Shift Capt. Rod Schmidt said firefighters worked through the night handling a number of powerline emergencies, and by 8:45 a.m. Wednesday he had processed paperwork for eight emergencies that had been called in that morning.
Schmidt said the damage appeared widespread.
“We came back from one place where there are probably a dozen trees on the powerline and on the road, but there are probably only three or four houses out there,” Schmidt said.