Storms lead to power outage

MINERAL COUNTY - A power outage last Wednesday, Aug. 13, left many Mineral County residents without electricity for approximately three hours and had businesses closing their doors temporarily.

The company that supplies electricity for Mineral County, Northwestern Energy, immediately deployed crews to address the issue which a spokesman for the company said was weather related.

The loss of power also caused headaches for emergency services within the county. Mineral County Sheriff Ernie Ornelas told county commissioners at their annual meeting on Friday, Aug. 15, because of an error by a company that updated emergency dispatcher communications equipment, services were temporarily communicating by cell phone.

“Not everything was hooked up to generator power,” Ornelas said. “That did cause an issue for us. Fortunately, we were able to figure out what the problem was. There was a fire we were dealing with and I was on my cell phone with dispatch dealing with that. It’s fixed now so if we have another power outage, it’s not something we will have to do.”

Ornelas said the problem was fixed immediately and at no time was the county without emergency services. He said the weather caused trees to come down on power lines but they were quickly repaired. Ornelas said, overall, there were not any major problems associated with the black-out and the inclement weather.

“We did have some trees blow over,” Ornelas said. “There were a few road blockages from downed trees. That has all been taken care of. There were no major problems.”

Northwestern spokesman Butch Larcombe confirmed the power outage was due to trees downed by the weather. He said Mineral County wasn’t the only area affected by power outages last Wednesday.

“We had outages all over western Montana,” Larcombe said. “In the Superior area, we had high winds and some trees landed on a transmission line and that’s what caused the outage.”

Larcombe said it was unknown how many people were affected by the loss of power but he did confirm the outage affected a majority of Mineral County.

“It stretched from Alberton at least to St. Regis,” Larcombe said. “It would’ve been everyone in that area. We’re not exactly sure how many customers were affected.”

According to Larcombe, he received no reports of any long-term damage as a result of the outage.

He said there was also no permanent damage to Northwestern Energy infrastructure.

“Our crews removed the trees from the lines,” Larcombe said. “Then they checked the lines for damage and then they re-energized the lines. We got it taken care of pretty quickly which tells me there probably wasn’t any damage to poles or cross arms or anything like that.”

Several area businesses temporarily closed their doors during the outage.

Power was restored by Northwestern Energy crews at approximately 7 p.m.