Scott Swanson
Sweet Home residents woke up Friday morning to raging winds from a “rare” spring storm that left trees on houses and many city streets littered with tree branches and garbage cans.
John and Diane Farthing were watching the storm out a bedroom window in their home at the corner of Meadowlark Street and Strawberry Loop about 7 a.m. when they heard a crash.
“Something went ‘wham,’ right next to the window,” Diane Farthing said. “Suddenly a tree fell right next to the window. I wish I’d videoed it.”
Their oldest daughter, Ashley, reported from another room: “A tree just fell on our car,” Farthing said.
“Then John started yelling, ‘Get out of the house! Another tree is about to fall.”
Two trees along the sidewalk on Strawberry Loop fell over onto the Farthings’ house, tearing up a gas line. Another didn’t fall, but is poised to tumble, she said.
Seeing the gas line hovering a couple of feet off the ground, torn up by tree roots, the Farthings decided to move to their store, OK Country Feed and Supply, for safety after John reported the situation to the gas company, she said.
“It was kind of fun trying to go out the front door with all the branches,” Farthing said. “The kids were trying to climb through.”
Across town, trees also fell on houses on Vine and Willow streets, and took down power lines. One at the intersection of 4th Avenue and Oak Terrace took out a power pole.
“It’s been a long night,” said Jeff Vandomelen of Albany as he stood in the rain on Highway 228 at Fern Ridge Road about 8:30 a.m., directing traffic around a downed power line that had been hit by a tree that fell across the highway. “It’s going to be a longer day.”
City streets manager Dominic Valloni said crews got busy Friday morning, cleaning up the mess.
“When things get like that, the whole crew scatters,” he said. “Everybody does what they need to do.”
On Evergreen Lane, residents picked up what Valloni estimated was “a load or two” of limbs that came down, said Donalyn Hotrum, who lives on the tree-lined loop that encircles a park area.
“We all got together as neighbors and cleaned up the whole street ourselves,” she said.
The winds started just after midnight in Albany, then moved east. By 4 a.m. they were roaring through Sweet Home, but due to power outages, actual details on wind speeds are scanty, said Meteorologist Colby Neuman of the Portland National Weather Service office.
He said the intensity of the storm was unusual and its timing was “really rare.”
“Normally, windstorms come October through February – mostly October through January,” Neuman said. “To have one in April, that has happened before, but not very often. To have it as strong as it was, that is a once in 10, 20, 50-year kind of thing in April. It was certainly up there.”
The intensity of the storm was similar to one that occurred in October 2014, he said.
“This was around 970 millibars of pressure, which is how we measure them. For us, 970 millibars is a big deal. The one in October of 2014 was 970 to 979, but this one covered a much bigger area. This was just an unusually strong low pressure that moved south to north, off the coast.”
Pacific Power spokesman Tom Gaunte said Sweet Home and Lebanon were among the hardest-hit in the mid-Willamette Valley, with a total of 17,000 customers without power at the peak, at 3 p.m. Friday.
“The weather really hit about 3:30 a.m. on Friday,” he said. “It went from everything’s fine to, in a few minutes, 14,000 customers out in the greater Lebanon and Sweet Home area.”
Things “kind of jigged and jagged” throughout the day until mid-afternoon, when another wave of outages left the 17,000 customers in the dark. Gaunte said 82 separate outages were responded to Friday and Saturday.
Things stablized late Friday, he said. By 5 p.m. only 2,200 customers were still without power and that number was down to 1,000 by 11 p.m. Power was finally restored fully at 6 p.m. on Saturday, Gaunte said.
In western Oregon, a total of 90,000 customers were in the dark, most of them south of Portland. Albany numbers “were not as bad. They topped out at 8,000,” Gaunte said.
Diane Farthing said the actual damage to their home appeared to be mostly a cracked truss, a cracked eave, bent rain gutters, damage to their fence and a broken porch light. Their car, she said, simply was scratched.
“We’re very thankful that there was no gas leak, that we didn’t have to evacuate the whole neighborhood,” she said. “Nobody got hurt. Now it’s just the hassle with insurance,” she said.
On the brighter side, people have offered them places to stay and someone from their church, Hillside Fellowship, brought them dinner.
Valloni said city streets were spared falling trees.
“We had some bigger branches but no trees go down on city right-of-ways. We lucked out, big time.”