SPOKANE, Wash. — An estimated 35,000 Avista customers lost power at some point during Wednesday night’s wind and dust storm in the Inland Northwest. This marks the first major storm since Avista launched its Public Safety Power Shut-Off Plan.
Wind and dust ripped through the Inland Northwest causing downed power lines. Some sparked fires, like the one on Spokane’s South Hill. Neighbors jumped in to stomp out the fire. There was no damage to the nearby homes. But the iconic giant Skeleton who peered over the white vinyl fence on South Southeast Boulevard is no more.
On the night of the storm, Avista elevated three of its circuits up to “extreme fire safety mode.” That means there would not be an attempt to close the circuit—or restore power. Those three included two in Northwest Spokane and one in West Clarkston. Avista's Director of Electrical Engineering and Program Director of Wildfire Resiliency Vern Malensky said one of the circuits in Northwest Spokane had an outage, which required manual inspection of the lines.
"If you were a customer in one of those three elevated circuits that were in extreme fire safety mode, what you would have experienced is a little bit longer outage while our crews potentially patrolled and removed any unsafe conditions," Malensky said.
He said it took a couple of hours to manually patrol the line before restoring power to those customers.
Customers like Carolyn Hughes lost power in North Spokane during the storm when her neighbor’s tree fell into their backyard.
"It took out all the wires along three poles," Hughes said.
The tree missed their shed and landed on the roof. But tonight she is grateful.
"It could have been much worse, it could have taken off the side of the house, could have taken out a load-bearing wall," Hughes said. "I mean we're good. We're good."
Hughes's family had no power overnight. But by early Thursday evening, their power came back on.