Winter storm leaves thousands without power
High winds toppled trees around Lincoln County on Feb. 1. On Granite Creek Road, residents worked with a lineman from Flathead Electric Co-op to clear a tree that had snapped power lines and broken a cross arm when it came down. (Duncan Adams/The Western News)
A tree felled by the storm that rolled through the region at the start of the weekend came to a rest on the property of Cabinet View Golf Club. (Paul Sievers/The Western News)
Robert Viergutz and Justin Ivins turned out with chainsaws to help neighbors along Granite Creek Road who either lost power or were blocked in by trees toppled during a Feb. 1 windstorm that caused widespread power outages in the region.
“You know what’s neat about this?” Viergutz said. “It’s people out helping other people. That’s community.”
One man traveling the road in a pickup realized too late he was trapped between a fallen tree blocking the road and downed power lines that he worried might still be energized. Ultimately, Viergutz, Ivins, nearby neighbor Terry Crooks and Cody Katzer, a lineman for Flathead Electric Cooperative, removed enough of the tree to open the street.
Many trees were down along Granite Creek Road.
Flathead Electric officials said Feb. 1 that Libby bore the brunt of the storm that caused widespread outages in the county and elsewhere in the utility’s service area.
The National Weather Service in Missoula reported wind gusts of 47 miles per hour in Troy, 53 miles per hour in Thompson Falls and 57 miles per hour in Kalispell.
Wendy Ostrom-Price, a spokeswoman for Flathead Electric, said 3,367 cooperative members were without power in Libby. Outages varied in length, she said.
Cooperative officials reported outages from Libby to the west to Big Mountain to the north, south to Swan Lake, northeast to Essex and points between.
“Hardest hit seems to be the area between west Kalispell and Libby,” utility officials reported in a Feb. 1 news release. “At the peak, Flathead Electric Cooperative experienced up to 90 separate outages, impacting approximately 10,000 customers.”
Lincoln Electric Cooperative, headquartered in Eureka, experienced a system-wide outage tied to a transmission line affected by the storm.
“At one point, all of our members were out,” said Melissa Brandon, a spokeswoman for Lincoln Electric.
She said the cooperative has about 4,700 members.
Some customers went without power for roughly four hours but others experienced longer outages, depending on their location, Brandon said.
Ryan Leach, a Missoula-based meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said the storm was tied to a Pacific cold front moving in from the west. Warm temperatures that greeted residents of Libby and Lincoln County when they woke Feb. 1 can occur in advance of a cold front, Leach said.