Storm causes mess

Keith Norman / The Sun Brandon Stahlhut, 14, wades in the street at 15th Street and Eighth Avenue Southeast after heavy rainfall Tuesday. Law enforcement officials indicated street flooding had occurred in several parts of Jamestown.

 By: Toni Pirkl, The Jamestown Sun

A storm Tuesday afternoon wreaked havoc in the Jamestown area with torrential rains, lightning strikes, power outages, flooded streets and downed power lines.

Power outages occurred not only in Jamestown but south and west of the city as well. Some parts of the county were still without power at 4:30 p.m.

All of the outages were storm-related, said Ritchie Wolf, Otter Tail Power Co. area engineer. He said more specific information on the causes wouldn’t be known until today.

“It was probably a lightning strike on the line somewhere,” he said about the outage in Jamestown.

According to Otter Tail’s monitoring system, the northwest part of Jamestown lost power from 3:23 to 3:38 p.m. Flipping a breaker restored power, Wolf said. It held for a minute or two then the power went out again. Flipping it on a second time, he said, this time “it held.”

Crews were dispatched to power outages caused by downed power lines in the Streeter and the Gackle area, Wolf said. The power was restored in Streeter by 4:30 p.m. and crews continued to work in the Gackle area.

“We managed to get some places back on by switching to another source,” Wolf said.

Downed power lines were also the problem west of town causing outages from Eldridge to Medina. The town of Medina remained without power at 4:30 p.m. Crews were still working in the Eldridge and Windsor areas as well.

“We don’t know yet what the trouble is out there,” Wolf said. “But we’re working at getting everything back on.”

Lightning was the culprit in a fire in the attic of a unit at 1500 Gardenette Drive in Jamestown as well. The Jamestown Fire Department was dispatched about 4 p.m. Fire Chief Jim Reuther said the insulation was burning when firefighters arrived. They spent nearly two hours making sure the fire stayed out. Sparks or smoldering can restart a fire in insulation hours later.

“It was blown-in insulation, so the firefighters had to shovel part of it out,” Reuther said. “It doesn’t take much to get the fire going again.”

Reuther had no estimate on damage.

Lightning also did in the equipment used to communicate with the fire department and the sheriff’s office through base radio stations at the Law Enforcement Center, which meant neither could be dispatched in the normal way. Instead, LEC dispatch would have had to phone any 911 fire call to someone at the Fire Hall. The dispatch changed over to the police frequency to call out sheriff’s deputies. The base stations were eventually restored.

The Communications Center also lost a telephone console to the lightning strike. Luckily, dispatchers had two other consoles to use for 911 calls. Redundancy is built in with backup equipment, said Emergency Manager Jerry Bergquist, and Tuesday proved it was money well spent.

“Lightning was a major issue for us,” he said.

Sirens at Jamestown Reservoir Marina and Frontier Village were also taken out by lightning.

“We know they were operating before the storm because we test them once a month,” Bergquist said.

Along with the lightning damage, the storm dropped two-thirds of an inch of rain between 3 and 4 p.m. and another .42 of an inch in the next hour. In all, the afternoon storm brought 1.1 inches of rain to Jamestown.

The severe storm also included a tornado warning. Radar indicated there was rotation in the clouds south of Jamestown and moving northeast. The city’s siren was activated at about 4 p.m.

Sun reporter Toni Pirkl can be reached at (701) 952-8453 or by e-mail at tonip@jamestownsun.com