Some Isolated Homes Will Remain In The Dark

Residents of far northwestern Montana may not get their lights back on until Friday as crews rebuild transmission lines smashed by Saturday’s powerful winds.

Power in most other areas of the Inland Northwest was restored by late Monday, but utility officials predicted scattered outages would keep isolated homes in the dark until today.

As many as 30,000 people may have been without electricity in the hours immediately following Saturday’s brief but intense storm, which the National Weather Service on Monday said included one official sighting of a tornado.

The hardest-hit area appeared to be near Elk, where Inland Power & Light Co. and Washington Water Power Co. reported miles of downed lines and dozens of shattered poles, some only months old because of last November’s ice storm.

WWP spokeswoman Dana Anderson said repairs to just one of two feeders in the Elk-Chattaroy area took 30 hours. “A feeder serves many hundred customers,” she said.

Anderson said WWP summoned its own crews and those of three contractors to reconstruct the network.

WWP also called in 27 operators to handle 5,200 customer calls, almost 12 times the number received on a typical Saturday, she said.

Normally, the company has four operators on duty, two in Spokane and one each in Coeur d’Alene and Lewiston. They field just 450 calls.

Anderson said the three locations are designed to back each other up in an emergency. But a phone line failure did not let calls bounce to less-congested centers from Spokane, she said.

The result was persistent busy signals that greeted most callers all Saturday afternoon and evening.

Inland Power Assistant Manager Dave Clinton said the storm appeared to hopscotch from Cheney to Deer Park to Blanchard, all served at least in part by the Spokane cooperative.

He said repairing the system was complicated in part by outages to Bonneville Power Administration lines feeding its substations, four of which were out at one time.

Inland crews, reinforced by contractors and other cooperatives in the area, worked without stopping until sunset Sunday to restore service to as many members as possible, Clinton said.

He said plans called for completion of the work by late Monday.

“Nobody expected something like this at this time of year,” Clinton said.

Catherine Parochetti, spokeswoman for Kootenai Electric Cooperative Inc., said winds between Rathdrum and Spirit Lake were so fierce power poles keeled over.

Almost one-third of Kootenai’s customers lost power, she said, but most had service restored by 10 p.m.

Only isolated vacation homes were still out Monday, Parochetti said.

In Sandpoint, the assistant manager of Northern Lights Inc. said four crews will need a few more days to rebuild a line along the Yaak River valley of Montana that serves about 200 customers.

“There wasn’t any area of our territory that wasn’t hit,” Rich Perkins said, cautioning that some downed lines may still be energized.

US West Communications spokeswoman Dana Smith said about 1,000 phone customers were still out of service Monday, down from 3,000 Saturday.

She said crews would be brought into the area from around Washington to help with repairs.

, DataTimes