A Foothill Road man is happy to be in one piece after Monday’s windstorm, although he can’t say the same for his house.

Christian Kimbrough had just brought in a tent and was sitting down watching television when the storm hit. From his chair, he could see the trees outside bending in the wind, including one he estimated was about 100 feet tall.

“All of a sudden, it disappeared,” Kimbrough said. “So I ran into our sun room to look and see, and as soon as I hit the sun room, that tree hit the roof. I thought I was gone — it was a pretty bad feeling.”

When the massive tree fell, a couple of limbs pierced the home’s metal roof, tore through the sheathing and ripped through the drywall.

“It was a loud ‘Boom! Boom! Boom!’ and the whole house shook,” Kimbrough said.

A recent transplant from California who maintained a property in Echo Lake for 19 years, Kimbrough said the incident matched the intensity of a different type of natural disaster he experienced while living in the Sunshine State.

“I didn’t know if people were shooting, or cannons were going off or what, but it’s the shakiest thing I’ve ever been in, and I’ve been through earthquakes,” Kimbrough said. “It was like that here.”

Hae said he was glad the toppled tree didn’t do more damage than it did. He spent Tuesday working with his wife to patch their roof — a total loss — until an insurance adjuster can visit.

“It could have fallen on the main part of the house instead of the sun room,” Kimbrough said. “My wife’s got her grandmother’s dresser out in the sun room, and that’s a couple hundred years old. It didn’t get hit.”

In fact, Kimbrough said the most shocking part of the whole incident was something that didn’t happen.

“Not one window got broken,” he said in disbelief.

“It caved in the roof and it broke at least five rafters, and it did not break a window. I was amazed.”

Peak wind gusts hit 56 miles per hour in the Creston area at the height of the storm.

Kimbrough said roughly 18 trees were destroyed or uprooted by the storm just on his and his neighbors’ properties. The wind snapped seven trees halfway up.

Flathead Electric Cooperative spokeswoman Wendy Ostrom-Price said roughly 6,700 members lost power at one point or another as a result of the storm and subsequent repairs.

Flathead Electric repair crews were kept working off and on through the night handling the 54 separate outages caused by the storm.

“We had several power lines down, and we had, I think, one pole down,” Ostrom-Price said.

She said the bulk of power was restored during the night, but there were some stragglers.

“Some people, mainly in the Swan River Road area, were not restored until this morning around 5 a.m.,” Ostrom-Price said Tuesday.

The reason the damage was so widespread, she said, was that the wind was coming out of the northwest, which is not typical. She said trees that have withstood winds for 100 years were getting hit from a different direction than normal, which brought some of them down.

“It was very unusual that way,” she said.

The Evergreen Fire Department also was kept busy by Monday’s windstorm, being called out to seven reports of power line emergencies.

In addition, the Ferndale and Creston fire departments were called out to two power line emergency reports and the South Kalispell, Marion, and Bigfork departments each were called to one report. The reports came in between 6:37 p.m. and 9:46 p.m.

Reporter Jesse Davis may be reached at 758-4441 or by email at jdavis@dailyinterlake.com.