BOZEMAN — Standing in Bozeman I used a device called an Anemometer, which tells you how fast the wind is blowing. Here it tells me gusts are around 7 mph but did you know if you were to use this device on Tuesday in Gardiner, it would’ve read 104 mph winds?
“When you’re talking 80-100 mph? No, we were not aware that was going to hit,” says Matt Fettig, the Bozeman Division Manager for NorthWestern Energy.
You may recall Tuesday, when we told you about winds in Livingston gusting up to 70 mph. But at the same time, north of Gardiner, winds surpassed that by a landslide, knocking down more than a dozen power poles.
“It can be a pretty catastrophic scene. You got 14 plus, anywhere from 40 to 60-foot tall poles laying on the ground. And all that conductor and wire,” says Fettig.
I asked Fettig how often gusty winds are able to knock over these massive electric poles.
“Thinking back, I was in Livingston for nine years and not to that extent. We have had poles go down—one or two or three, here and there. But to have 14 go down in a row is pretty unusual."
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Unusual is right, according to MTN Meteorologist Matt Elwell.
“It happens where you get those strong winds, but this is an anomaly. This is like the perfect storm of how things come together. That cold air, dense cold air, rushing out,” Matt says.
Matt helped me understand the anomaly by making an analogy to hurricanes.
“Typically, we’re looking at tropical storm to Category 1, maybe 2. So, we’re talking 74-100 mile per hour winds pretty consistently, and that’s what we were dealing with here,” Matt explains.
But we’re in Montana, where hurricanes aren't exactly our everyday weather. So where did this wind come from?
“I'd say in simple terms, think about cold air. It’s more dense, so it has a tendency to sink. So, as it comes out of those higher elevations? That dense cold air is gaining momentum as it comes downhill. As we come into these narrower areas, it just continues to speed up,” Matt says.
Funneling into areas such as Gardiner and Livingston. But although it’s windy, folks still choose to live in these areas. Meaning for Fettig and his team? They have to be ready for anything.
“As soon as it happens, we have our transmission engineers that get to work right away. And he worked into the night Tuesday to get that line redesigned. By Wednesday, we were down there transporting poles and material and ready to go,” Fettig explained.
Fettig tells me around 200 folks only lost power for a few hours Tuesday. And NorthWestern’s goal is to have these poles back up and running by this weekend.
