Spring storm takes out power, downs trees

Lights went out at 9:30 p.m. Sunday evening in the midst of a powerful thunder and lightning storm across western Sanders County, putting 510 Northern Lights members in the dark. The co-op called up the three linemen from Trout Creek and extra crews from north Idaho to assess the situation.

It wasn’t until they discovered the problem was caused by damaged equipment on the Bonneville Power Administration’s (BPA) high tension lines, which NLI linemen were not permitted to either work on or even assist the BPA’s line crews due to the differences in equipment. The outages ranged from Trout Creek to Noxon and Heron and up the Bull River.

BPA scheduled a planned half-hour outage for Monday from 11:30 a.m. until noon. However, when they tested the repaired lines, the splices didn’t hold. Local businesses had been told expect the outage, but it rescheduled for 5 p.m., although that was not for certain. The damage to BPA’s equipment was described as “significant.”

NorthWestern Energy customers throughout Sanders County also lost power. In the Prospect Creek drainage outside Thompson Falls, power lines were knocked into the creek.