Power being restored days after storm

BILLINGS – Utility crews continued working Thursday to restore electricity to hundreds of homes and businesses in Montana and western North Dakota, two days after a heavy, wet snowfall caused trees to break or fall into power lines.

Hundreds of customers in the region were still without power Thursday afternoon, though officials hoped to restore service to most by the day’s end.

“I’ve been here close to 27 years, and I have not seen a storm as widespread as this,” said Dan Sharp, a spokesman for Montana-Dakota Utilities Co.

At the height of the storm, he guessed that close to 15,000 customers, from eastern Montana to Bismarck, N.D., and south to Story, Wyo., were without service at some point.

For MDU, most problems occurred 100 to 150 miles on either side of the Montana-North Dakota line, he said.

Brandon Wittman, assistant general manager for Yellowstone Valley Electric Cooperative, said 300 to 400 of the estimated 3,500 customers who had been without power after the storm still were on Thursday afternoon.

Additional linemen had been brought in to help, and work was largely concentrated around Shepherd and Lockwood, he said. Both communities are near Billings. The goal was to have power restored by Thursday night.

The biggest challenge had been the number of downed lines, which limited crews to getting only a couple customers at once back in service, he said.

Crews also hoped to restore power Thursday to about 250 customers in the Billings area served by NorthWestern Energy, spokeswoman Claudia Rapkoch said. Close to 9,000 customers, many in Billings, had no power at some point after the storm, and thousands more in Bozeman had also been affected, though outages there lasted only a couple hours, she said.

Jim Kraft, Yellowstone County’s director of emergency services, said just six people stayed at the two shelters opened Wednesday in Billings to help people affected by the outages.

Meanwhile, two routes closed by the storm, Interstate 94 eastbound from Miles City to Mandan, N.D., and U.S. Highway 12 from Baker to the North Dakota line, reopened Thursday, said Charity Watt Levis, a spokeswoman for the Montana Department of Transportation.