This is from the Daily Astorian (Astoria, OR):
Storm blows trees onto roadways North Coast hammered with wind and rain; power outages reported in Astoria, Warrenton
The Daily Astorian
The weekend storm buffeted the North Coast with high winds that felled trees and caused power outages affecting some 13,000 people.
U.S. Highway 30 was littered with leafy debris Saturday afternoon as high winds tore at roadside trees. High winds shook smaller cars traveling from Clatskanie west to Astoria throughout the evening.
Trees fell and blocked the highway for a time. A 6-inch diameter tree fell just east of the Wauna mill, but enough of the roadway was cleared by motorists for traffic to continue in one lane until help came.
West of the mill, a 14-inch diameter tree crashed across the highway, blocking traffic for more than a half-hour. The only vehicle able to drive under the tree - which came to rest 5 feet above the road surface - was a Mini Cooper being driven toward Westport. The three women inside the tiny British import were all smiles as they drove past a line of more than 30 (larger) cars and pickups and continued their journey.
However, just afterward an Oregon Department of Transportation crew arrived and had traffic moving in both directions within 10 minutes after one worker revved up his chain saw to chop the tree into two pieces while his partner used the snow plow attachment on the ODOT truck to push the heavy timber off to the side of the road.
Members of the Knappa-Burnside-Svensen Fire Department provided manpower to assist and took charge of traffic signaling at Knappa where drivers were detoured south of the highway because of another road blockage.
In addition to the ODOT crews on Highway 30, ODOT's Humbug area crew spent most of the day Saturday and part of the night dealing with fallen trees on U.S. Highway 26, and the Tillamook crew also had a couple of downed trees on Highway 6, said Mike Spaeth, ODOT's District 1 Maintenance Manager. He said they were able to keep up because they were ready.
"We were preparing for this storm. We knew it was coming," Spaeth said today. He said there was less wind and especially less rain than originally predicted, which lessened the potential for slides. "We lucked out. Mother Nature was nice to us. We were able to keep up with it," Spaeth said.
When the lights went out all over Warrenton shortly after 5 p.m., traffic signals on busy U.S. Highway 101 stopped working and traffic backed up for a few minutes before police officers got it moving again. Customers at the North Coast Fred Meyer were briefly in the dark, until the store's generator kicked in.
A power outage blacked out much of eastern Astoria about 7:30 p.m. Saturday night. Customers at Safeway had an eerie few seconds in the dark before the backup generators kicked in and the checkout counters lit up for customers to make their purchases.
It was a tough night for Pacific Power, said Sheila Holden, regional community manager. First Pacific Power's transmission line went down at 5:09 p.m., then BPA's line went down, she said. After those lines were back up, trees started blowing down on distribution lines. "More than 13,000 customers were without power at any given time," Holden said.
It was especially tough, because Friday afternoon, lightning had knocked out Pacific Power's operations center in Warrenton.
"It fried our data control switch and isolated our computer system from the rest of the company," said Karl Hansen, Pacific Power's operations manager. He said it wouldn't have mattered except for the storm, which struck the next day. He said they had to go back to communicating the old-fashioned way, but phone and fax.
Hansen said linemen came in without being called and immediately started working to isolate the trouble areas. By 5:15 p.m. 10,600 customers were back on line. By 5:54, power was restored to Warrenton. And later, the 3,500 customers in east Astoria, Fernhill and Knappa-Svensen, served by the BPA line, once again had electricity.
"We got everyone restored. That's our goal," said Hansen.