October surprise

COEUR d'ALENE — Avista crews made progress throughout Saturday and will continue to work through the night to restore power after Friday’s snowstorm.

As of 5 p.m. Saturday, Avista had restored power to 17,827, or about 81%, of the 22,000 customers who lost power at the height of the snowstorm.

"Restoring the remaining 4,173 customers will be challenging because of the nature of the time-consuming and labor-intensive repairs that are necessary for service restoration," a press release said. "With more than 474 outage incidents and the amount of damage to individual service lines, it is anticipated that the majority of the remaining customers’ power will be restored by Sunday evening."

All available Avista crews were working the outages, including line crews, contract crews and vegetation management crews, a press release said.

The snowstorm dropped an October record of 7.7 inches on Friday and another .2 on Saturday, for a total of 7.9 inches in Coeur d'Alene.

It caused scores of slideoffs and accidents on highways. Trees and branches came down early Saturday throughout North Idaho. Larger branches took down power lines, blocked roads, crushed fences, covered cars and damaging roofs. Sherman Avenue was littered with fallen trees branches.

Many began to dig out Saturday, as they awoke to eerie, apocalyptic-like conditions in some neighborhoods. In snowy, icy conditions, and temperatures in the 20s, people united to pull tree branches off cars and out of roads, and filled pickups with them, but by late afternoon, many large branches remained where they fell.

Dale Curley of Hayden said he awoke to find a tree in his front yard missing several branches, a tree in the backyard that was badly damaged, and a large tree snapped in half in his neighbor’s yard.

Other trees were “bent over completely,”

“I’ve got them laying on the ground right now,” he said. “They’re gone, period.”

Curley said he had lived there 13 years and had never seen anything like it. As he looked around his neighborhood, he saw many trees suffered the same fate as his.

“There’s so much snow,” he said.

Curley was looking at a tree in his backyard and said, “It’s so loaded. It’s amazing. Boy, does it look heavy.”

Climatologist Cliff Harris said it was the earliest start to winter since 1895 and it was the first time in October that a winter storm warning was issued here.

Friday's 7.7 inches of snow was a single-day record for October, breaking the Oct. 23, 1957 mark of 3.8 inches.

The overall total record for October had been 6.8 inches of snow, also set in 1957.

While the snow has stopped falling, wind in the forecast could impact restoration efforts and temperatures were expected to dip into the teens, perhaps set record lows, overnight.

It's estimated about 20,000 customers between Avista, Kootenai Electric and Inland Power were affected by the outages.

KEC's power outage map early Saturday showed 12 outage areas affecting about 100 members. Later, all power had been restored.

“We want to thank our customers for their patience as we work to restore power to all customers who lost power as a result of this snowstorm,” Dennis Vermillion, Avista president and CEO said. “We understand living without power during cold weather can be difficult. We continue to dedicate all available resources to restore the remaining customers.”