A major windstorm blew through the Flathead Valley on Tuesday evening, leaving thousands of households still without power Wednesday morning.
According to Flathead Electric Cooperative spokesperson Wendy Ostrom Price, about 5,100 homes and businesses from Libby to Bigfork were affected by more than 90 power outages resulting from the storm.
The cooperative’s outage map indicated that the power was out for hundreds of people in Libby, more than 500 people in the Marion and Kila area west of Kalispell, and hundreds without power in Whitefish and up the North Fork.
Crews are working to restore power throughout the valley.
“We had a tree take out a transmission line, and so that impacted four substations,” Ostrom Price said. “We had over 90 outages scattered across our service territory.”
That transmission line affected cooperative members in the Bigfork/Many Lakes area.
“We had to redirect power from our Kalispell sub, and of course it was very challenging in bucket trucks and wind gusts up to 70 in the dark and snow,” Ostrom Price said.
Downed trees could be seen throughout the valley after the wind, which gusted up to 52 miles per hour in Kalispell and more than 50 miles an hour around Columbia Falls and Whitefish, according to the National Weather Service. The summit of Whitefish Mountain Resort had gusts up to 59 mph. Wind gusts around Flathead Lake and up the North Fork hit 60 and nearly 70 miles per hour. Gusts up to 90 mph were reported on the east side of Glacier National Park, according to the NWS.
The National Weather Service is predicting a brief winter storm will start making its way into western Montana, with moderate snow expected in west-central and southwest Montana.
According to ABC News, the same windstorm wreaked havoc on the Pacific Northwest before making it to Montana, killing at least three people with falling trees and knocking out the power for at least 380,000 people. Schools in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene were closed on Wednesday.
This story will be updated.