GREAT FALLS — A powerful thunderstorm hit Great Falls on Thursday evening, with a weather station in town logging 2.52 inches of rain in less than an hour, leading to flash flooding across the city.
There was also prolific lightning, with nearly 25,000 cloud-to-ground strikes across Montana from Thursday morning through Friday morning.
The storms moved north toward the Hi-Line overnight, dumping heavy rain over western Phillips and eastern Blaine counties, where radar estimates indicate 3 to 5 inches of rain have fallen.
This led to flash flooding that affected some business owners, such as Michael Mattern’s Twenty Past 4 on the northwest side of Great Falls.
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He explained, “All we had were snow shovels from the winter season, and we slung all the doors open and just started pushing everything out.”
Twenty Past 4 was able to recover quickly, but it took the entire team to get there.
Unfortunately, many insurance policies in Montana do not cover floodwater, meaning that if you are already ill-equipped to handle flooding, then you may be out of luck.
Fortunately, businesses such as SERVPRO step in at this point.
Servpro has meters that can penetrate through drywall and wood to tell you how far the water has gone into your building.
Servpro General and Production Manager Brandon Franklin and Josh Forrest, respectively, “deal with insurance every day so we can talk to them and kind of get to the bottom of the situation fairly quickly,” so that you don’t have to. Servpro also recommends that, whether or not you use professional services, you do not let the issue just sit there and get worse. To bear through the storm, you must be prepared to get wet.
