Outages persist in county, region

SANDPOINT — There is a light at the end of the tunnel for Bonner County residents who remain in the wearisome grip of being without electricity, according to Avista Utilities.

Debbie Simock, a spokeswoman for the utility, said on Friday that the dwindling number of customers who lost power in Tuesday’s damaging windstorm should see their service restored by Sunday.

“At this point, I don’t have an exact time,” said Simock.

At the height of the outage, as many as half of Bonner County’s 15,238 Avista customers lost power, according to Simock. As of Friday evening, there were 32 outages affecting 99 customers, which is less than 1 percent of the customer base in Bonner County.

Northern Lights Inc. had a total of 117 outages affecting 1,394 members in the Panhandle and northwestern Montana. The highest concentration of outages were located south of the Pend Oreille River and the Priest Lake area.

An NLI manager’s report said major distribution line repairs are enabling crews to begin focusing on individual outages. However, the energy cooperative was unable to provide individual estimates on restoration times due to the large number of outages.

Inland Power & Light, meanwhile, reported 728 outages affecting 1,683 of its customers in Bonner County. The cooperative estimates that the majority of its outages should be resolved by Sunday, although it may be until Tuesday or Wednesday until power is restored in some of the smaller outages.