Mother nature huffs and puffs

While the Silver Valley isn’t exactly known for windy conditions, that’s exactly what it saw Monday – along with the rest of the region – when a powerful storm swept through.

Personnel with the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office, Fire District No. 2, Prichard/Murray Volunteer Fire, and Avista Utilities responded to dozens of wind-related calls Monday all across the community.

Largely coming from the Prichard and Pine Creek areas, calls of fallen trees and downed power lines flooded the county’s dispatch center.

While everyone who walked outside was affected in some way (lots of messed up hairdos, for sure) the ones most inconvenienced were those who lost power.

According to Avista’s service outage map on Monday night, power outages still existed all over the Panhandle.

“Substantial winds across Idaho and Washington today have caused power outages to approximately 30,000 Avista customers,” Avista stated Monday afternoon.

Erika Neff of Kootenai Electric Cooperate said strong winds in the area caused widespread power outages affecting more than 10,000 members.

Inland Power reported that about 7,000 customers in Spokane, Kootenai, Bonner, Stevens and Lincoln were without power.


In total, approximately 50,000 homes across the region have been affected.

As of 7 p.m. Monday night, roughly 300 Shoshone County Avista customers were without power due to winds up to an estimated 50 mph. Those without power locally are largely located in the Pine Creek/Pinehurst and Prichard areas.

Since the wind storm carried on into the afternoon as well, repair crews were forced to focus largely on assessing the extent of the damage to the electric system.

“Given this, estimated restoration times are currently unknown,” Avista added. “With assessments ongoing and widespread damage anticipated, customers should be prepared for a prolonged outage of 1-2 days and seek personal resources as needed. Once crews have been able to assess each area, we will provide updated restoration times for our customers.”

To add to repair time, Avista is currently operating under dry land mode, which is an approach that helps decrease the potential for wildfires and requires their teams to physically patrol certain rural and forested areas before they can re-energize lines.

No injuries or serious property damage were reported as a result of the storm, but the strong winds did not help firefighters when they responded to several incidents on the west end of the valley.

Due to the holiday, limited information was available by press time on the Wall Ridge fire that had burned approximately 2 acres of land near Cataldo as of Monday night. It is believed though that strong winds played a role in the fire’s growth.

The News-Press will provide more information on this fire as it becomes available.