Winds surpassed 90 miles per hour Tuesday morning in Big Timber, where the airport recorded the region’s highest wind gust.
Airport manager Kirk Bryan lives in the middle of town.
“It blew all night, and at 4:30am in the morning when I got up, it was clocking 97 mile per hour gusts at the airport,” said Bryan. “Town’s got branches and downed trees, and all you hear is chainsaws running.”
“It was a lot of cleanup,” said Liz Rhoades with Yellowstone Air Service, a company that provides fuel and other services for private planes. “I know I got called up to our airport at 5am because one of our buildings was having shingles ripped off the siding.”
Meteorologist Tessa Stetzer with the National Weather Service in Billings said wind overturned a semi-truck on Highway 191 north of Big Timber and took out a 911 line for about an hour.
The weather service also recorded over-90 mile per hour winds in the mountains of Carbon and Park Counties.
Stetzer says now comes the colder temperatures.
“Typically before we see that cool down we do get that build-in of warm temperatures and typically those winds,” she said.
Forecasts show a snowstorm is expected as the weekend approaches.
