Thunderstorms dumped nearly 2 inches of rain and displayed a dangerous beauty unusual for the Sweet Home area Wednesday and Thursday.
The first storm, most likely a localized cell, according to the National Weather Service, moved through during the late afternoon and evening Wednesday, lightning strikes blowing branches and boughs across the landscape, splitting trees, starting fires, knocking out power and knocking down power lines.
According to the U.S. Corps of Engineers rain gauge, 1.05 inches fell on Wednesday, and .92 inches fell on Thursday, almost all of it during the storms.
At Shea Point, a tree fell across Highway 20 Wednesday, narrowly missing a small pickup. Firefighters, and drivers whose progress was blocked by the tree, cleared the roadway while lightning struck the shores around Foster Lake.
The second storm moved through the area at around 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, and water quickly rose higher than city sidewalks while storm drains struggled to handle the inundation. The lightning-laden storm brought more power outages, and the Post Office finished out the day with flashlights, while businesses dealt with water slowly creeping toward their doors. Lucky’s Deli suffered damage as rain apparently found a way through the roof and flooded in from the back parking lot.
A bolt reportedly struck outside the new water plant, Public Works Director Mike Adams said. The story was second- or third-hand. The electricity apparently found its way in through a conduit and jolted a worker.
At Sweet Home High School, all voluntary sports workout sessions were cancelled and students were sent home as soon as school let out at 3 p.m., many being picked up by parents in the torrential downpour. The baseball awards dessert, which was scheduled for Thursday evening, was cancelled and rescheduled later for 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 10, in the cafeteria.
“Storm water inundated the city quite rapidly in huge quantities,” Adams said. Crews were out quickly to assess damage and deal with problems.
The main problem was that drains were overloaded, Adams said, and it just took a while for the storm runoff to drain away.
Public Works did send its sweeper to clear debris from the edges of the roads to make sure drains would not be plugged, he said.
Police Chief Bob Burford said most of the calls Wednesday had to do with downed branches and trees and responding to hazards “to make sure traffic could pass safely.
“Thursday, we had more significant problems because of the sheer quantity of rain that fell,” he said. “Still, everything was relatively minor.”
In one call, an elderly female driver stopped in the oncoming lanes of Main Street near Towne Pump, Burford said. Her windows had fogged up, and she didn’t know what to do.
An officer helped her into a nearby business, where she could shelter, Burford said. Then the officer moved her vehicle.
Oak Terrace was closed for about 20 minutes because water was rushing north on Fifth Avenue, rolling around the old Boys and Girls Club building and washing debris and mud across Highway 228 below.
On Wednesday, the Oregon Department of Forestry Sweet Home Unit reported two single-tree fires, one near the peak of Scott Mountain. With no summer fire crews on yet, Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District, with assistance from Milt Moran of Cascade Timber Consulting and Lebanon and Brownsville fire departments, extinguished that fire.
The ODF responded to a fire in the Lacomb area.
Both were less than a tenth of an acre, Unit Forester Ed Keith said.
“We’ve had more lightning in the last week than we have in a normal year,” he said. Luckily, it’s early in the season, the storms came with rain and the vegetation is still green.
ODF personnel were busy patrolling in the following days watching for sleeper fires, smoldering fires caused by lightning strikes, waiting for drier weather to break out.
Neighboring ODF units also had similar small fires, Keith said.
There were no fires reported in connection with the Thursday storm.
Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District had it easy on Thursday.
“We actually never ran anything yesterday,” Fire Chief Mike Beaver said Friday, but the agency did respond to six calls directly related to the storm on Wednesday.
The most significant call was the fire on Scott Mountain at 8:06 p.m., Beaver said. A tree fire was reported on North River Drive. Three callers reported wires down, including Wiley Creek Drive and a transformer fire on Old Holley Road. On Rice Road in Holley, Pacific Power had to deal with a tree fallen on an energized wire.
During the storm, SHFAD also had three medical calls, unrelated to the storm, within 45 minutes of each other, he said.
The next day, Sweet Home firefighters received no calls.
“We were here,” he said. “We were waiting for things to start. All-in-all, considering the intensity of those two storms, things fared really well.”
Beaver, who grew up in the area, thought Wednesday’s lightning display was one of the longest he has ever seen around Sweet Home, he said.
David Wilson, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Portland, said the storm was definitely unusual.
“That’s one of the strangest ones we’ve had in awhile,” he said.
Thursday’s storm resulted from an upper low-pressure area over California. It swirled unstable convections that rolled north through Oregon.
The National Weather Service is investigating several reported tornado sightings, including one in Peoria at 3:30 p.m on Thursday, he said. They remain unconfirmed.
The storm that hit Sweet Home on Wednesday was probably a more localized storm cell rotating through the region from the south, he said.
Pacific Power reported 580 customers, mostly in the southwest part of town, without power from 2:54 p.m. to 5:55 p.m. Six customers were without power until 11:30 p.m.
On Wednesday, Pacific Power had a longer outage, mostly east of 18th Avenue. The company reported 2,257 customers out of power at one point. The outage started at 5:45 p.m. By 8 p.m., only 300 customers were without power. Their power was restored at 2:08 a.m.
Consumers Power, which services a small number of homes in rural areas around Sweet Home, reported 100 to 250 customers out of power for four to five hours on Wednesday.
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