Utility blues: Water line breaks, power pole fire leads to outage

Fire and water emergencies affected customer utilities last week in Whitehall.

The two instances had workers from NorthWestern Energy and the Town of Whitehall diligently working several hours to get utilities working for residents, schools and businesses.

Butch Larcombe, a spokesman for NorthWestern Energy, reported a call was received at 6:15 a.m. on Friday morning reporting a power pole on fire. NorthWestern Energy quickly sent out crews having some of the 178 customers affected power back on in thirty minutes.

The rest of the customers had power restored about noon. The cause was reported...