Windstorm damage heavy; near misses unforgettable

The roar came first.

Judy Scalf and her 3-year-old granddaughter, Rylee, were sitting in chairs facing each other on the covered patio of her home on Mullan Hill Road south of Spokane Tuesday night when she heard the low rumble of the coming wind.

“I said, ‘Honey, we’ve got to go. This is bad,’ ” said Scalf, who had just finished cleaning pitch off the bottom of Rylee’s foot when she saw nearby trees begin to bend with the wind. “I didn’t hear the tree snap.”

Moments later, Scalf was pulling herself off the ground and off of Rylee, who was bleeding and motionless. The tree had crashed through the sheet-metal patio roof, knocking the grandmother onto the child. Unable to find her telephone, Scalf headed next door for help: “I picked her up. When she started to cry, I just felt better.”

Rylee needed eight or nine stitches in her cheek, where sheet metal from the collapsing roof cut into her. Scalf escaped with only scrapes and bruises.

“I’m a little shook up,” Scalf said Wednesday, her voice still cracking. “It keeps replaying in my head. It is a miracle.”

The severe thunderstorm hit the region Tuesday in waves of sustained and gusting wind that knocked trees into power lines, damaging roofs and cutting power to more than 30,000 utility customers.

Most had power restored by Wednesday. Catherine Markson of Avista Corp. said about 4,400 customers remained without power Wednesday evening. She said crews would continue working through the night. Most customers should have their power restored by today, she said.

It could be weeks before the full accounting of the damage can be made, said Nick Scharff, chief of Spokane County Fire District 10. A wind gauge at his station in Airway Heights clocked one gust at 79 mph.

“Everywhere you look telephone poles are leaning where the base is loose, and trees are leaning in the downwind direction,” Scharff said. “There is a lot of damage that will have to be looked at over the course of time from utility companies to tree people. It’s amazing the trickledown that this storm caused.”

Calls continued to come in all day Wednesday of more trees and power lines coming down. But it was nothing compared with the hundreds of calls that dispatchers handled from 5:30 p.m. Tuesday to midnight.

But there were also many other close calls, like Scalf’s, that emergency crews didn’t even know about.

Some of the worst damage came in Spokane Valley.

Mark Albert’s family was visiting him at his Ponderosa Community home in Spokane Valley when the storm hit. The 11 family members, including five grandchildren, weathered the first storm all right, but the second one decimated his home when one of the towering pines crashed down on top of it about 8:30 p.m.

“The beams just came down around us,” Albert, 53, said Wednesday, adding that it was amazing no one was hurt.

The tree basically inverted the roof of Albert’s home in the 4200 block of South Bowdish Road, knocking the ceiling in. The city condemned the home on Wednesday. It will have to be leveled to its foundation.

Albert, who works as an engineer, said he didn’t know if he would rebuild or not.

“The day after I moved in was the firestorm, then the ice storm and now the tree storm,” Albert said. “I’m not moving back here unless they cut all the trees down.”

The hit-and-run storm also destroyed Rusty’s Produce, which had operated under a tent for 15 years at Sprague Avenue and McDonald Road.

“When I heard the wind had knocked down my tent, I expected to find it crumpled up against a pole, not ripped up in five pieces and spread all over town,” said business owner Rusty Keele. “It was like a bomb went off in here.”

The wind picked up the 30-by-40-foot tent bolstered by 3-inch steel rods and 450-pound barrels and blew it into the power lines above. The weight of the tent snapped two wooden power poles, and the gusts threw the heavy barrels hundreds of feet away.

Keele’s wood stove ended up in the middle of the intersection.

“I bought this tent because it was rated for 80 mph winds,” Keele said. “I had a cantaloupe down at 4th.”

Keele kept a positive attitude Wednesday as he, along with the help of family and friends, picked up the scraps of his business strewn around the Value Village parking lot.

“We just have to go from here,” Keele said. “I’ll be back here on Sunday with cherries, selling them out of the back of my truck if I have to.”

Jeff Sitton, of Spokane Roofing Company, said he’d received 25 to 30 calls before lunch from residents either needing advice or help fixing roofs.

“I’ve heard of some really big claims,” said Sitton, who had just inspected a 70-foot tree that smashed into a home near Indian Trail. “A lot of apartments in the Valley seem to be hit really hard. South Valley is the area where we are getting the majority of the calls.”

In Airway Heights, the wind pushed a huge corrugated-metal culvert off the lot of Spokane Culvert Company, Scharff said. “It rolled like a big wheel.”

The runaway culvert, which Scharff estimated as 12 to 15 feet high and 20 to 24 feet long, rolled across Craig Road, took out a fence, a power line and two more fences before crawling onto Fairchild Air Force Base property.

“The wind must have turned it. It came across Craig Road again and ended up hitting a trailer at the Vietzke Mobile Home Park,” Scharff said. “As the crow flies, it rolled three-eighths to a half-mile. But it zigzagged. Lord knows how far it rolled.”

In North Idaho, about 2,500 north Kootenai County residents near Spirit Lake, Twin Lakes and Hauser were without electricity for up to eight hours, Kootenai Electric Marketing Manager Larry Bryant said. Power was restored to all but 12 homes on East Riverview Drive south of the Spokane River by 9 a.m. Wednesday.

“Mother Nature makes the rules sometimes,” Bryant said.

Law enforcement agencies in the area had reports of downed trees, power outages and a few grass fires probably caused by lightning strikes. Post Falls Police Chief Cliff Hayes said dozens of trees blew over in the city, some landing on houses and parked cars, but there were no reported injuries.

Bruce Holloway, chief of Spokane County Fire District 3, said his mostly-volunteer force that covers the southwest end of the county, spent most of Wednesday fixing some trucks and looking to make sure small grass fires had been extinguished.

“At 4 p.m. (Tuesday), I was on another fire, and I saw the front coming so I called” the state Department of Natural Resources, Holloway said.

The U.S. Weather Service predicted winds at 20 to 30 mph, both Scharff and Holloway said.

“Whenever cells develop, that’s why our job is so dangerous, because you can get caught in the middle of those things,” Holloway said. “The Weather Service was not expecting this at all. I don’t blame them, but it sure caught everybody by surprise.”