Wind Rips Out Trees and Power in Flathead Valley

About two thousand people in the Flathead valley went for periods of time without power on Thursday Dec. 5, mostly due to gusty winds.

"We're experiencing a variety of outages in our service territory,"Windy Ostram-Price of the Flathead Valley Electric Co-op, "they're primarily weather related. High winds are toppling trees and branches onto powerlines. We had one instance in the Libby area where a truck drove into a power poll, but the others are weather related."

The unseasonably warm weather may be a leading cause in these outages. "There's no snow on the ground to act as insulation and the trees are not frozen into the ground because of the mild weather we've been experiencing." says Ostram-Price. "A lot of our trees don't have tap roots so the wind can just pull them out of the ground and knock them over"