By Jason Stuart
Ranger-Review Staff Writer
A fallen tree knocked down a string of power lines on Wednesday, cutting power to several city blocks on the west side of the river, including to both of Glendive’s grocery stores.
The outage struck about noon Wednesday after a tree behind Albertson’s came crashing down across the power lines, bringing the lines, poles and transformers crashing down to earth.
“We had three poles and the transformers that went out with (the power lines),” said Montana-Dakota Utilities spokesman Mark Hanson.
According to Hanson, about 120 MDU customers on that side of the river were without power for about 45 minutes until utility crews were able to “sectionalize” the downed lines and redirect power.
One of those customers was Reynold’s Market, which was temporarily forced to close its doors due to the outage.
“We had to shut down and lock the doors up for about an hour,” said Reynold’s store manager Bill Ryan.
Ultimately, however, Ryan said the outage did not affect his store too badly. While they had to throw out some food from the deli “hot case,” overall, the store avoided any large food losses.
“We have good help here, and we all just pulled together and got everything covered up and taken care of,” Ryan said. “And we were kind of lucky it happened when it did, because most of our coolers were going through a defrost cycle anyway.”
In fact, after a visit by District Sanitarian Kevin Pena gave them the go ahead to re-open and begin selling their food again, Ryan said his store benefited from the outage, as Albertson’s remained without power.
“We were pretty busy, obviously,” Ryan said.
Albertson’s was forced to close for some eight hours while MDU crews worked to replace the poles, transformers and power lines behind the store.
Albertson’s store manager Geri Cullinan noted that the store’s backup generators also failed, forcing her to do something she said she cannot recall being done in the 35 years she has worked there — shutting the store down completely.
“It was pretty bad, we had to shut down completely because the generator had problems too,” Cullinan said. “It was worse than a normal power outage. That’s the first time I can remember us ever having to completely shut down.”
Albertson’s was finally able to open its doors again at about 9:30 p.m., Cullinan said. Despite the lengthy outage, she said that the store’s food losses were “overall, not bad.”
“Actually, we knew right away (the outage) was going to be bad, so we followed protocol and immediately covered everything,” she said. “So we didn’t lose a lot.”
This is the second time in the past year that a fallen tree has downed the power lines behind Albertson’s. A tree also took out the lines during the July 2015 microburst storm which hit Glendive.
Cullinan said she thinks the tree which fell Wednesday was likely damaged in that storm and was just waiting to fall. Both she and Hanson noted that part of the clean-up from Wednesday’s incident is to cut back some of the trees away from the lines.
Reach Jason Stuart at rrreporter@rangerreview.com.