Missoulians woke up Thursday morning to pick up the pieces left by a powerful storm that slammed the region overnight. Heavy sustained winds turned the city’s streets into a winding maze of busted conifers and tangled branches.
Frank and Mary Head stood outside their home surveying their street. Frank described the moment he felt the winds hit.
“I’d just gotten to sleep, kinda, and boy, all of a sudden: ‘boom, crash,’” Head said. “It was quite the storm.”
His wife said she was relieved their property hadn’t been damaged.
“It was over fast, you know,” Mary Head recalled. “That was the thing that was amazing. It was like, ‘Wham. OK, all done.’”
She gestured to the mounds of branches lining the sidewalks.
“People can’t put this much in their garbage,” she said. “I mean, look at the size of some of these branches that are huge.”
The National Weather Service office in Missoula began sounding the alarm in the region shortly before 9 p.m. Wednesday. Warning coordination meteorologist Marty Whitmore said they’d been watching the storm gather power over Oregon and Idaho.
Hang in there #Missoula: about 10 more minutes then the storm will be mostly out of here. It IS moving north and east and will become an issue further down the line.
— NWS Missoula (@NWSMissoula) July 25, 2024
Thanks to ALL for your reports. We've got our hands full, so we'll collectively thank you. Stay safe. #mtwx
“It got even stronger than what we expected,” Whitmore said in a phone interview. “You know, anytime we get to around 60 miles-per-hour or higher, we’re calling them ‘damaging winds’ for sure. And so, that’s what we were putting out over the alerts. But, yeah — 80 [mph]. That’s a big wind for this area, for sure.”
A few miles into the Hellgate Canyon in East Missoula, Justin O’Brien stood in the doorway of his home. He’d been at a family reunion in Seeley Lake the night of the storm. A massive blue spruce lay across the concrete path to his door.
“I just got a few calls, and they said the trees were down in my yard, and there were lots of high winds,” O’Briend told MTPR. “I just came running in this morning to try to clean it up. There's just devastation all the way down the valley, trees down.”
O’Brien recalled seeing trees and debris strewn over highways. He hopped in his truck with a red gas can to search for fuel for his chainsaw.
By noon Thursday, it was still unclear the extent of the damage across the region. Stop lights throughout Missoula were working intermittently. The city asked residents to conserve water because its pumps were running on a backup generator. Recreators were asked to avoid rivers due to reports of power lines in the water.
Utility NorthWestern Energy said it restored power to more than 20,000 customers overnight. By midday Thursday, its outage map showed thousands still in the dark in the Missoula and Bitterroot valleys.
Back near the University of Montana, several old conifers lay collapsed along a residential street. One had smashed into the corner of a home — another into the back of a Toyota SUV. Two men with chainsaws were cutting the tree away. As they removed branches, recent college graduate Sam Purvis came outside.
“Uh, that is my car,” he told the men. They were with his property management company, there to help clear the tree off the street.
Purvis said he was at a bar downtown Thursday night when the lights went black. About 10 minutes later, he said a friend called him and told him to come home.
He found the massive tree, about two feet in diameter, had shattered his back window and collapsed the rear of his car. The front end was lifted slightly off the ground.
“I used to fight wildfires, so we would go to a lot of downed power lines and cars,” Purvis said. “But, it’s never happened to me before.”
He looked at the damage and remembered something.
“Actually, my drum set’s in my car, too, so hopefully that’ll be covered,” Purvis said. “I play in a country band, and we have a gig today. I’ll have to borrow someone’s drum set.”
Missoula officials have designated drop-off locations for tree debris around the city.
The Red Cross is staffing the Missoula County Elections Center on Russell street. The center is set up to help people charge essential personal devices. It also has air conditioning and a shower.
