More than 3,200 Flathead Electric Cooperative customers were left without power for several hours Thursday morning after a vehicle hit a power pole at 3:02 a.m. and took out a transmission line near the intersection of Montana 35 and Dyer Road.

By late Thursday afternoon, power had been restored to all customers.

A Flathead County deputy told dispatchers that the driver did not complain of any pain but caused his airbag to deploy when he hit the pole so hard it snapped nearly in half.

The cooperative conducted a planned outage Thursday morning in that area to make repairs, Flathead Electric spokeswoman Wendy Ostrom-Price said.

“It will involve some pretty major repairs and could take four to five hours,” she said.

A couple of other outages also affected cooperative members early Thursday morning. A power pole was on fire about 7:15 a.m. along U.S. 2 in Evergreen near Midway Rental, Ostrom-Price said. 

Another smaller outage was reported in the Ferndale area, though the cause of that incident wasn’t immediately known.

Responding to traffic issues caused by the outages, the Kalispell Police Department reminded motorists that when a traffic light is not working, that intersection should be treated as a four-way stop.

Online:

Flathead Electric's Outage Viewer is online at http://outage.flathead.coop:8181