Sue Lani Madsen: Relationships matter for resilience

It’s relationships that matter in a disaster. We see it during a wildfire when an impromptu fleet of trailers and places to evacuate livestock are offered across the rural community. For rural electric co-ops, those relationships look like skilled crews, a convoy of trucks and a pile of power poles.

On July 24, hurricane-force winds knocked out power to at least three-quarters of the population of Missoula and the surrounding counties, including the community of Frenchtown 18 miles away. Power still hadn’t been fully restored a week later.

It wasn’t headline-holding national news. It was barely even regional news, with a short article in the Outdoor section of The Spokesman-Review on July 25 and nothing in the Seattle Times or out of the Associated Press. In Missoula and Mineral counties of Montana, it was a disaster.

Traveling home from North Dakota last week, we needed to know more. We needed local news.

We were unaware we were heading into a declared disaster area on Monday night. Our destination was Grass Valley Farms, offering RV-friendly overnight farm stays for travelers. There is no fee but an expectation that guests will repay the hosts’ hospitality by purchasing something the farm is selling.

The farm is nearly surrounded by development pressing out from the city of Missoula. We messaged ahead with our arrival time and asked if they’d have the farm stand open so we could buy protein for dinner, or if we should stop on the way through the city for supplies.

Farmer Cory Miller wrote back. “Stock up. We are still without power from the storm last week.”

We’d been following regional news all week, including tracking fire starts back home in Eastern Washington and along our travel routes in the Dakotas and Montana. Surely, a storm powerful enough to cause an outage lasting more than a day in a metropolitan area would be newsworthy.

Montana news outlets had coverage of the ongoing impacts and cleanup. We pulled into a Yoke’s grocery to stock up as instructed, and found more than a few empty cooler and freezer cases from the power outage.

Miller filled us in the next morning on a tour of his farm. “There was a red flag warning, then a black storm wall moved through the valley with 100-mile-an-hour winds.” He described standing in the field and watching the power poles along Mullan Road “snap, snap, snap” as the storm moved in from Frenchtown.

Power to Miller’s house had been restored by the local utility co-op, but he still had to restore power to the rest of the farm, including the mushroom beds and irrigation pivots. There was no rush to repower the pivots, the storm had destroyed the controllers for the irrigation systems and no parts were available.

A young farmhand described three fields of hay lost, where hay that had been cut and not yet baled simply blew away. He was on his way to start mending fences on another ranch near Lolo.

The expensive houses in the neighboring subdivision had their power back on by Friday night, but the small ranches bordering his were still out of power on Tuesday morning, and people were hauling water for their livestock out of a creek. More than 200 utility poles were broken in the storm and 43 barns between Missoula and Frenchtown lost their roofs, according to Miller, who described the aftermath as “carnage for 60 miles all around.”

Northwestern Energy and Missoula Electric Cooperative serve the valley, and both brought in extra crews of linemen. On Mullan Road alone, Missoula Electric reported 42 broken poles and crews were still at work replacing and rewiring on Tuesday morning.

One of those crews came from Spokane’s Inland Power & Light Cooperative, part of a network of electric utility co-ops that shares resources during a disaster. Jennifer Lutz, chief operating officer for Inland Power & Light, said her company sent two foremen, three linemen and an apprentice. Each drove a truck, including one pulling a mini-excavator and one haling as many poles as they could send. They got to Missoula by midafternoon Thursday following the Wednesday night storm and returned early this week.

“We’ve never sent a crew to Montana before, but our CEO came from Montana and we were close enough to help,” said Lutz, who agreed good relationships are essential in responding to disasters.

“When we do have storms like this, we offer mutual aid for materials and crews. We don’t use it very often but it’s really nice to have it.”

In a world of virtual “friends,” with a constant buzz of flashy national breaking news alerts, remember to nurture those connections that matter under pressure. Real relationships are demonstrated by neighbors who are ready to haul your goats out of a Level 3 evacuation zone. Or show up with a crew to get the power back on.

Contact Sue Lani Madsen at rulingpen@gmail.com