Power has been restored to thousands of people across the Flathead Valley following a widespread but brief outage caused by a problem at a Bonneville Power Administration transmission line in the Columbia Heights area.
The outage started shortly before 2 p.m., and power was restored within an hour.
The outage affected approximately 13,000 Flathead Electric Cooperative members on the eastern side of the valley, from the Bad Rock Canyon and Columbia Falls down through east Kalispell and Evergreen into Creston and Many Lakes and the Lower Valley.
It also impacted traffic lights, leading the Montana Department of Transportation to release an advisory.
Wendy Ostrom-Price, public relations officer for Flathead Electric, said the BPA’s transmission line feeds nine of the cooperative’s substations. After the transmission line problem was rectified, Flathead Electric crews were tasked with reenergizing the impacted distribution lines.
“They’re a wholesale power supplier,” Ostrom-Price said of BPA. “What impacts them impacts us.”
Ostrom-Price noted that although the outage was big, there wasn’t significant damage, such as downed trees, helping crews restore power quickly, with plenty of time to spare before trick-or-treating begins.