Wind fans fires in big dust-up
Just after 6 p.m. Monday, a reddish-brown dust cloud enveloped the region, bringing gritty, windy mayhem that knocked out power, felled trees and fueled fires.
Callers flooded dispatchers with reports from all over Eastern Washington and North Idaho, reporting fires, downed power lines and trees blown into houses and across roadways.
Monday’s storm was triggered by weather dynamics not often seen in the Inland Northwest, said Charles Ross, forecaster for the National Weather Service in Spokane.
Winds gusting to 54 mph were whipped up by an outflow coming out of a line of thunderstorms that had pounded southeastern Washington earlier in the day. When the lightning storms to the south collapsed late in the afternoon, the large cloud formations, or cells, sent out a strong burst of wind known as an “outflow boundary.”
“They don’t usually come in this strong,” Ross said.
Fire reports flooded in from Spokane Valley to Airway Heights to Spangle. Joe Daily said the state Department of Natural Resources had been dispatched to 18 or 19 fires in the region by Monday evening.
“When you get a fire in these kinds of conditions, it’s darned near impossible to stop,” Spokane County sheriff’s spokesman Cpl. Dave Reagan said.
Spokane firefighters struggled to contain a 100-acre fire in a wheat field near Hayford Road near the Northern Quest Casino that burned a barn and caused several evacuations.
In downtown Spokane, the wind blew a 7,620-volt transmission line into a light pole at Walnut Street and Riverside Avenue in Spokane. The power line arced and electricity traveled underneath Riverside, igniting two grass fires, Avista lineman John Gower said.
One of the fires burned a small patch of grass before flaming out. The second fire ignited the vegetation on the south side of the Maple Street Bridge. Flames grew to 30 feet and the wind whipped sparks over the roadway before fire crews responded and closed down the road. Firefighters quickly extinguished the flames.
Visibility at Spokane International Airport dropped to a half-mile at 6:20 p.m. during the peak of the storm in Spokane. Because of the lack of visibility, six incoming flights were ordered to circle for about 90 minutes before they were finally cleared to land, airport spokesman Todd Woodard said.
“I was downtown when it occurred,” Woodard said of the dust storm. “It was very odd.”
Candy Penix said she was chatting with her sister online in her apartment when the storm hit. Suddenly, the room went black. A Norway maple tree in the rear yard of an adjoining apartment house in the 1500 block of West Ninth Avenue came down on a power line, putting out electricity to two apartment buildings.
A few blocks away, a large piece of a black locust tree fell onto the trunk and rear window of Cindy Coffman’s 1985 Toyota at Ninth and Adams.
“It’s an awesome sound,” she said of the tree coming down.
The tree shattered the rear window of the car that Coffman called “Girl.” It appeared the vehicle’s frame was bent. “That’s it for Girl. It’s totaled,” Coffman said.
She’s a single mother who works a part-time, minimum-wage job at Tesoro. There will be no other car in her immediate future. “I just can’t afford it,” she said.
The tree narrowly missed two cars parked across the street, falling between the two.
Deaconess Medical Center lost power at 6:22 p.m. along with a small section of the lower South Hill and the western edge of downtown Spokane.
The emergency generator kicked on immediately, said Deaconess spokeswoman Judy Nerud. It had just been tested the day before.
But for the two-plus hours that the generator was the only source of power, hospital staff diverted patients to other local hospitals.
While power was on in patient areas, the kitchen was without power for awhile, and automatic doors weren’t working, Nerud said.
“We can’t take you here. You need to go to Sacred Heart or urgent care,” an emergency room nurse told one young couple with a sick son.
Along with the dust, a rainy thunderstorm formed over Post Falls and drifted to the northeast. The mountains of Shoshone County in North Idaho were being doused as well, said Ross, of the National Weather Service.
A brief period of rain or showers is forecast for this morning across the region. Temperatures will be cooler. Highs are expected in the low to mid-80s in Spokane today.
The wind storm came after more than a month of dry hot weather across the region. Monday was the 22nd consecutive day of 80-degree-plus weather. The last soaking rain in Spokane was on June 10. July was 3.6 degrees warmer than average in Spokane, and only saw .08 inches of rain.