Wind storm pounds the Sisters area

A wind storm with gusts well over 50 miles per hour uprooted trees from Cloverdale to Black Butte Ranch (BBR) and knocked out electrical power in parts of the Sisters area for about six hours on Wednesday, March 16.

Trees toppled onto roofs of homes and cars at the Ranch.

Shortly after 4 p.m., Black Butte Ranch fire and police units were dispatched on a report of a tree that had fallen on a condominium with renters still inside.

A BBR fire district student firefighter was already on scene when police arrived. The fire student evacuated the occupants out the rear of the condo; the renter’s belongings were removed by BBR fire personnel and the renters found different lodgings.

The next morning, BBR Officer Les Brush found another tree on a house at South Meadow 118. Brush noted that the same house had been hit by a tree in an earlier windstorm.

Despite damage, no one was hurt at the Ranch.

Central Electrical Cooperative reported a couple of outages caused by trees falling over transmission lines. There were several isolated outages in Camp Sherman.

According to CEC spokesman Jim Crowell, a large juniper tree knocked down a 50-foot transmission pole in the Cloverdale area, dousing power to about 200customers.

A large pine fell through a line and knocked out the Tollgate and Black Butte Ranch substations at about 8 p.m. According to Crowell, the incident plunged more 2,000 electrical customers into total darkness for over six hours.

“We’ve had more damage from windstorms in the past, but that was a pretty good one,” Crowell said. “We don’t want to repeat it because we had everybody we could throw at this out all night.”

Several trees fell in Sisters, one narrowly missing a house in the Edge of the Pines neighborhood. No significant damage was reported.

Dust kicked up by the high winds blanketed Highway 20 between Bend and Sisters, reducing visibility to nearly zero in some areas. However, no accidents were attributed to the storm.