Seattle City Light crews continued to make progress Sunday to restore service to customers affected by Saturday’s windstorm, reducing the number of homes and businesses without power to under 7,000.
Strong winds with gusts up to 60 miles per hour uprooted trees and broke off large limbs, damaging power lines and utility poles throughout the Puget Sound area. About 80,000 City Light customers have had power interrupted at some point since the start of the storm with about 58,000 out of service at the peak of the outages. Tacoma Power, Snohomish PUD and Puget Sound Energy also responded to large numbers of outages in their service territories.
For City Light, the north end of its service territory was hit hardest, especially Lake Forest Park.
Crews working in Lake Forest Park throughout the weekend found multiple areas of damage from large, fallen trees on each of the main feeder lines delivering electricity to the city, requiring more extensive repairs to restore service. Additional damage is expected on the smaller, neighborhood lateral lines that carry power to several hundred people each.
Given that damage, additional crews have been assigned to the Lake Forest Park work. They expect to complete work on the main feeder lines this evening and start work on lateral lines. If customers see the power returning to their neighborhood and they are still without service, they are asked to call (206) 684-3000 to report that they are still out.
Work on the lateral lines will continue through the night into Monday morning before crews can focus on individual service lines. Full restoration for all customers is anticipated sometime Monday afternoon.