High winds Friday toppled trees, sending them onto power lines, into roadways and onto vehicles — one even came crashing down on a Vancouver Fire Department ladder truck responding to a medical emergency.
A crew of Vancouver firefighters was traveling Code 3 — with lights and sirens — east on Mill Plain Boulevard near East Reserve Street when the tree hit the huge ladder truck.
Vancouver Fire Department Capt. Jonathan Lawrence was in the passenger seat of the rig when he heard the tillerman, who sits in a raised cab in the back and steers the back wheels, yell “tree, tree, tree!”
“By that time, the tree had fallen,” Lawrence said. “The center of the trunk exploded around us.”
The large Douglas fir, which measured about 4 feet in diameter at its base, fell on top of the rig while it was traveling about 35 mph. The truck’s inertia propelled it through the branches and trunk, which broke both windshields and broke out windows on the passenger side before the truck ran over the top of the fallen tree.
No one was injured, aside from a couple of crew members who were hit with branches and cut by broken glass.
“It’s truly a miracle nobody was seriously hurt,” Battalion Chief Lee Hazelton said.
The firefighters stayed on duty and manned the department’s reserve ladder truck.
The damage to the truck is not yet known, Vancouver Fire Department spokesman Joe Spatz said.
“’If we can repair it, we will,” Spatz said. The cost to replace a ladder truck runs between $900,000 and $1 million, he said.
Power outages
Friday’s winds caused damage throughout Clark County, downing trees, ripping the roof off a mobile home in Brush Prairie and leaving thousands temporarily without power.
Gusts reached 39 mph Friday morning at Pearson Airfield, according to the National Weather Service.
About 14,000 customers experienced outages from 85 individual outages, Clark Public Utilities spokeswoman Erica Erland said.
Line crews worked throughout the day responding to the various problems, Erland said. At the storm’s peak, about 5,000 customers were without power.
Approximately 500 customers were still without power Friday night, she said, and crews were expected to be out throughout the night working to restore power.
Public works crews were also kept busy Friday clearing roadways of fallen debris. Between Clark County Public Works and Vancouver Public Works, crews responded to nearly 40 reports of trees, limbs and debris that fell into roadways and blocked traffic.
A tree fell in Orchards Park and another fell onto an occupied car on Northeast Beebe Road, south of Fargher Lake. No one was hurt in either incident.
Some roads were closed for various lengths of time, including Amboy Road between Elliott Road and Morning Drive and eastbound state Highway 14 between Lieser and Ellsworth roads.
For the most part, crews cleared obstructions quickly.
However, traffic on one stretch of road, Mill Plain Boulevard near Southeast 123rd Avenue, was limited throughout the day as a downed tree snarled a power or telephone line, Vancouver Public Works spokeswoman Loretta Callahan said.
In Washougal, a large cedar fell across Main Street, and several power lines were downed west of 24th Street. Motorists and pedestrians were encouraged to avoid the area for several hours due to the danger posed by falling power lines.
Oregon storm deaths
The brunt of the storm appears to have been felt south of the river, with the weather connected to at least five deaths in Oregon.
In the Portland area, a 67-year-old man was killed when he was struck by a tree limb.
The Washington County Sheriff’s Office said a neighbor found Ronald Kibert of Tigard under the large limb Friday morning. The neighbors performed CPR until paramedics arrived, but Kibert was pronounced dead at a hospital.
The sheriff’s office said Kibert liked to take walks in the area where the tree fell.
Winds were gusting at a time that a small plane went down in a field north of the Eugene airport, killing all four people aboard, Linn County Sheriff Bruce Riley said.
A boat also overturned on the blustery Columbia River near Bridal Veil, sending three men and a woman to area hospitals. Two of the men and the woman suffered severe hypothermia. The third man was flown to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland, where he later died, according to reports from KATU-TV, The Columbian’s news partner. The four were technicians on a research boat belonging to the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, KATU reports.
Portland General Electric reported that more than 100,000 of its customers were without power Friday in the three-county metro area.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
