Winds irritate, but cause little damage

MAT-SU — Winds howling through the Valley caused a great deal of inconvenience but, at least according to those tasked with responding to the mayhem, didn’t cause any major trouble Sunday and Monday.

In isolated cases, the wind’s effects were certainly dramatic: A plane flipped over at the Palmer airport. Ambulance and fire crews on the emergency band radio warned each other of snowdrifts. Shingles flew off of a roof in downtown Wasilla. The power went out, for a brief time, in nearly the entire Valley.

But, said Dennis Brodigan, the borough’s Emergency Services Department, while crews were certainly busy, the emergencies were mostly low-level, nothing serious or life-threatening.

"For the last six hours or so it’s been pretty good for the most part," Brodigan said early Monday afternoon. "However, all day yesterday (Sunday) and through the night last night in the core area we responded to quite a few wind-related incidents."

He said those incidents were mainly fires — trees falling into power lines or blown transformers.

And then, he said, there were the "indirect calls, medical calls for trouble breathing, which is pretty typical for whenever we get blowing anything our asthmatic calls, difficulty breathing calls go up."

There was one call, he said, at Moose Street and Bogard Road for a power line that had fallen on a car. The driver, Brodigan said, escaped without injury after Matanuska Electric Association managed to get the power shut off.

He said winds were pretty steady at about 60 mph. The weather service, he said, predicted that would die down by Monday afternoon to 40 to 50 mph with gusts up to 60.

Though the borough had to open its emergency operations center for high winds in March 2003, that windstorm featured 80 mph winds with 100 mph gusts. And it lasted a lot longer than this one is projected to.

"It started Sunday and hopefully it will be gone by the end of the day today," Brodigan said Monday.

And, so far at least, the borough has been able to handle it.

"The only time that we open the EOC is when our resources are exhausted and we haven’t quite hit that mark yet," he said. "Our day-to-day resources have been able to handle this pretty well. Thanks to our on-call responders who got up and stayed out all night in the wind and the cold to take care of some of this."

As for the power company, MEA spokeswoman Lorali Carter said that as of mid-afternoon Monday there were between 300 and 500 customers without electricity.

"No big pockets. Just pretty much small, scattered outages primarily here in the core Palmer-Wasilla area," she said.

She said one major outage at about 1 a.m. Monday shut off power in most of the utility’s coverage area. But it was brief.

"That only lasted about 10 minutes," she said. Exactly why it happened, though, is unclear.

"If something trips, then the system is set to automatically re-set itself. But if the danger still exists the power stays off," she said.

The National Weather Service predicted the winds here will taper off by this afternoon.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.