What a mess

By Diane Hettrick

My power went out just before 7pm on Tuesday, November 19, 2024, along with a lot of other people.

At the worst, Seattle City Light had over 100k customers without power. Many are still out but they had whittled it down to only 60k by noon Wednesday.

This was Shoreline at 12:30am. The dark red circles are 2000 or more. The white areas either have power or never had significant power - cemeteries, parks, etc. Orange is from 1 to several hundred and red circles are in the middle. The red colored areas are details of the outage area.

Someday I'll find out the exact numbers for the circles but this is not a good time to ask questions.

Almost all of the Echo Lake and Meridian Park neighborhoods were restored at 1am. As far as I can tell they all came back online at once, so it was either something easy and/or the crews were in the area.

Or perhaps the Universe was compensating for turning off the power ten minutes before the ELNA Zoom meeting was going to start. (It has been rescheduled for next Tuesday November 26).

The northwest corner of Shoreline and most of Lake Forest Park were hit the worst.

An area near Hamlin Park lost power early but also regained power first. I assume they got a restoration crew before everything started going dark.

All the utility companies prioritize to restore power in this order:

1. Life Safety - Crews are dispatched immediately to fix downed powerlines that pose any immediate safety threats to the vicinity.
2. Emergency Services - Crews are dispatched to emergency services and facilities critical to public health and safety, such as hospitals, police, and fire.
3. Customers and Residents - Crews repair areas that will restore power to the largest number of customers and continue working until all customers are back in service.

The outages affected a large portion of western Washington, all the way to Bellingham.

Snohomish county PUD

PUD Snohomish County Service Area Update

11/20/24 10:54 AM - Outage update: PUD crews continue to work on restoration efforts across our service area. We have made good progress, restoring power to more than 80,000 customers. Efforts are currently focused on critical infrastructure like hospitals and schools.

Heavily impacted areas: Damage is extensive throughout our service area, including trees down blocking multiple roads creating challenges for crews making repairs. Lake Stevens and Snohomish were the most heavily impacted areas.

We have a total of 35 crews in the field, including line, service and tree crews. Currently, 11 mutual aid crews have offered to help in restoration efforts.

PSE outage area, plus Cameno and other isolated areas

PSE Update

The windstorm caused extensive damage to our system late afternoon yesterday and into last night. As of 11:55am, we have 382k customers out of power.

Our focus today is on critical infrastructure and public safety, as PSE has been fielding many 911 calls for safety/emergency needs. With daylight approaching, crews will continue assessing more of the overall damage to the region and provide restoration updates as information becomes available.

We anticipate a multiple day outage and encourage customers with critical needs to make alternate plans as we work to assess the situation and restore power.

PSE with customers covering most of western Washington reported over 400k customers without power and warned that it might be days before restoration.