Nearly 100 poles downed in sever storm

Craig Herbert had what he called a trial by fire during the severe winter weather two weeks ago. He had been the manager of NorVal Electric Cooperative for just three and a half months when the storm snapped nearly 100 wooden power poles and knocked out power to just about all of his northern customers.
He noted that this was the same storm that made national news when it hit Oklahoma and Tennessee, but hardly a blip when it went through Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota. It's just a matter of population.
The problem started on Tuesday, Jan. 19, when freezing fog began to collect on the wires. On Thursday morning a small amount of freezing rain sealed in the fog.
"Conductors the size of your pinky grew to need two hands to get around them," Herbert said.
The wires began to stretch under the weight of the ice and the wind began to pick up. The wires started slapping and NorVal was losing substations. The weather deteriorated over the weekend and by Saturday morning, they saw they couldn't handle the problem with their crew of 11 linemen.
Herbert called in a five-man crew from Red Rock Power, Inc., an electrical contractor out of Havre that specializes in power lines and substations. They set some poles that had already snapped and had a pretty good day, Herbert said, but on Sunday the weather really turned bad. At 11 a.m. they made a 10-minute trip out of Opheim to a substation, seeing two poles snapped. When they turned around, there were six more poles laid down. They had to call the crews off so no one would get hurt. They followed the snowplows home to Glasgow and the trip took two hours.
"It was whiteout. We couldn't see the end of the truck," Herbert said. "It was hard to see the yellow lights ahead."
On Monday, work resumed with an additional crew from Red Rocks setting poles. The crews would raise an electrified line up, bring in the digger truck and set a pole under the hot line.
"That's where linemen earn their pay," he said.
By Wednesday night they had the last people back on line.
"The saving grace was the weather was hanging between 24 and 30 degrees – not super cold," Herbert said.
During the whole time, people were thinking about the hardships the crews were facing. They brought food to the office, Herbert said, and made sure the linemen were well fed.
Glenn Kleeman was without power for five hours less than eight days. He winters with a cow herd on a ranch north of Peerless, just 3 miles from the Canadian border. He has a generator but didn't need to use it a lot.
"It's a kind of a unique place – I don't need power to have water," Kleeman said.
He has a really strong spring that goes through the house and out to the barn, flowing continuously all the time. It wasn't hot, but it was water. For heat, he has always used a propane floor furnace that sends its heat up through a grate in the floor. He didn't have a lot of groceries, but he had enough. He put the meat from the freezer into a bucket and stuck it deep into a snowbank. He never lost service from his old rotary phone, so his brother was reassured about his safety.
"I wasn't like a lot of people worried about heat and pipes freezing," Kleeman said. "I was just hoping it wouldn't get too cold to start the tractor to feed the cows."
The only problem was light to read by.
"Candles don't give a lot of light. You just go to bed."
He said it quit storming on Monday and he could have gotten out Tuesday if he had had to. He finally did leave for a while on Wednesday because he was short of reading material.
The rough estimate of the damage to the NorVal system is $400,000 to $500,000, and they are still getting a count of the number of miles of line replaced. NorVal is trying to see if they qualify under FEMA for reimbursement of the costs of these repairs, but they probably will not. Herbert said they will probably have to fund the cost through loans. If they can capitalize the loan, they can spread the cost out over many years and make payment a little more palatable, he said.