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What to Expect On Day Two of Yesterday’s Wind-Related Outages

At City Light, we take great pride in serving our community. It's our community too! We want to restore your power as quickly as possible, and we're going to do everything we can to accomplish that goal safely and efficiently.


Yesterday, a windstorm blew through Western Washington. Almost 300,00 people lost power throughout the region as wind gusting over 60 mph battered trees and blew them into contact with power lines. In the Seattle City Light service area, 40,000 customers lost electricity over the course of the day.

City Light crews worked throughout yesterday afternoon and evening to restore power to those customers. As the day came to an end, approximately 4,000 City light customers remained without power. At this moment, City Light’s overhead, underground and vegetation management crews are continuing their work throughout the service area to bring power back to everyone.

City Light crews expect to restore service to almost everyone by this afternoon. Here’s what City Light customers can expect as the outage restoration process moves forward today.

It’s going to take a while to reach everyone.

After threats to life safety and emergency services are addressed, City Light restores power in the order which will benefit the most customers. That’s why outages that affect thousands are resolved before outages that affect dozens. Once the large outages are remedied, the restoration process moves to medium-sized outages, and so on.

Are you the only person without power in your neighborhood? If so, you won’t be the first stop for a crew in your area. We have over a hundred outages across our service area, and that’s a lot of individual outages to address. Don’t worry, though. Help is on the way.

Here’s a graphic to more fully explain the process.

Working in the dark is more difficult.

City Light crews are used to working in adverse conditions, but it is an inescapable fact that doing line work in low light makes the job more difficult. This is another factor that will contribute to delays as work continues overnight.

 

Lineworkers need sleep too.

But that doesn’t mean work comes to a halt! It just means it’s time for a shift change. It may take a few extra minutes to bring the new folks up to speed on current restoration efforts.

 

We won’t stop working until the job is done.

At City Light, we take great pride in serving our community. It’s our community too! We want to restore your power as quickly as possible, and we’re going to do everything we can to accomplish that goal safely and efficiently.

For more updates, follow our Facebook and Twitter channels. Information is also available on our power outage map. Thanks for being patient as we work to bring power back to everyone throughout our service area!