Destructive winds tear through La Conner

A powerful windstorm wreaked havoc across the northwestern part of the state on Saturday, leaving downed trees, damaged homes and utility interruptions throughout the La Conner area.

“I think it caught everyone by surprise,” said Fire District 13 Chief Roy Horn.

Wind speed in La Conner averaged around 13 miles per hour on Saturday, with gusts reaching at least 50 miles per hour, unusual speeds for any storm in August. The wind gusts came from the southeast.

Fidalgo Island and the Swinomish Reservation were hit especially hard, with one power outage lasting from late Saturday morning to 9 a.m. on Monday, affecting nearly 1,500 homes and businesses in Swinomish Village, Shelter Bay, and the Pull and Be Damned and Hope Island neighborhoods.

The outages created other problems in the community, shutting down water pumps for a large portion of Shelter Bay.

Shelter Bay manager David Franklin said this was the longest water had been off in the gated community for at least 12 years.

According to Chief Horn, the district received 34 calls on Saturday, more than 10 times the district’s average — which is three per day — most for damage caused by falling branches.

Calls were for trees smashing houses in the Shelter Bay area, taking wires down on Indian, Snee-Oosh, and Reservation roads, and storm damage in the Similk Bay area.

“It’s not getting rain all summer,” said Dakota Barnes, owner of City Tree Service in Anacortes, which was working to clear a tree that had fallen on a home on Umatilla Way in Shelter Bay.

The tree had landed directly on top of the house, crashing through the roof and bending the flue on the top of the chimney, pulverizing the upper floor.

“It almost killed them, they were in the kitchen, and it landed right on the house,” he said. “They’re pretty traumatized.”

The homeowners were surveying the damage while the tree service workers cleaned up but declined to comment.

While the Town of La Conner on the east side of the Swinomish Channel was spared major outages, branches were still strewn across the road, and a small outage briefly impacted N. Third Street and some homes in south La Conner.

East of town, a tree came down on McLean Road on Saturday afternoon, creating traffic problems until it was moved to the side of the road.

The outages caused stop-and-go traffic and delays on Highway 20 because the signal lights were disabled.

“Everyone in the county was tied up,” said Horn, noting that when Fire District 13 ran out of “road closed” signs, it was unable to borrow any from the county, which already had all its signs in use.

At one point, during the worst of the storm, outages even brought down the emergency dispatch system.

“911 was down for a couple hours,” said Horn, noting that some areas of the county remained without the service.

“It’s just frustrating,” said Chief Rick Balam, of the Swinomish Police Department, which dispatched officers to help clear debris off the roads and check on residents. “It’s hard to work without the radios and the computers,” he said.

Puget Sound Energy was also swamped, with most callers in the area receiving a message simply saying that the company was aware of outages “in all counties.”

At the height of the storm, roughly 238,000 customers had lost power, according to a Puget Sound Energy press release.

“In addition to strong winds, most trees still have their leaves, and many of them have been stressed by recent drought conditions, making them more susceptible to snapping or falling,” the release stated.