If you have power - count yourself lucky

Power outages 7pm 8-29-15

By Diane Hettrick

I live in one of the tiny, clear spaces on this map in central Shoreline. My Comcast cable went out for a while, but the lights never even flickered, so I had no idea that the outages were so widespread.

This is the most extreme and widespread outage I have seen since I started monitoring outages.

There's another huge section of outages in NE Seattle. Richmond Beach seems to have escaped this time, possibly because they got hit so hard last November.

The unusual thing about this event is there does not seem to be any one big cause, like a tree over a main line. Instead, the outages appear to be mostly one at a time. The largest outage I found on a random search was 30 households.

That means the repairs have to be done one at a time. Some may not be completed until Sunday morning, simply because there are so many that crews have to get to.

There is one large outage in the Richmond Highlands / Hillwood neighborhood with 1944 households. Crews expect to repair that by 10pm Saturday.

And the cause of all this? Trees and branches that fell during our unusual windstorm.

If there are any trees down in your neighborhood - send me a photo.