A storm that rolled through northwest Montana brought enough snow and strong winds to cut power to thousands of people Monday morning, October 10th.

“We recieved an outage call around 3:00 a.m,” Flathead Electric Coop Public Relations Officer Wendy Ostrom-Price said. “People were reporting outages and we have a couple poles down. We mainly have trees down, we had very heavy, wet snow and that settles on the lines it snaps them, it also takes down trees because they are not frozen in the ground yet.”

Price said around 1,400 people were still without power by noon on Monday, and that all Flathead Electric Coop personnel were working hard to restore power to the region. Price explains how wide the outage was at its peak.

“Approximately 4,000 members have been impacted throughout, we've had a total of 34 outages,” Ostrom-Price said. “They vary in size across the service territory, some bigger than others... a nasty little blizzard blew in here.”

4,000 homes without power is significant, but it is a relatively small number of the 63,000 homes that receive power through Flathead Electric Coop.

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