Falling trees caused severe power outages across Western Washington, and thousands of customers were still in the dark nearly a week later.
The majority of the outages are in King County and with Thanksgiving just days away, we learn the storm has shut down parts of the utility’s power grid.
Power grid failures are something that usually happens on the East Coast, where hurricanes occur.
But last week’s bomb cyclone brought hurricane-force winds to parts of Western Washington, something unusual here.
Power has been restored in the Renton Highlands neighborhood after nearly a week without electricity.
“Now I just have to write everything by hand,” Mindy Bick said.
Mindy works from home for Maple Valley Electric.
“And I normally work on a big computer instead of a laptop,” she said. “So it’s a little more limited.”
The only way she could send her electrical crews into homes in the dark on this sixth day was by cell phone.
How did they deal with it? “Generator, off and on,” she said. “Lots of board games and just lots of family time.”
Her neighbors had to do without power despite their subway lines.
But Puget Sound Energy’s transmission system took a big hit this time.
“The bomb cyclone may have caused more damage than we thought,” said Baosen Zhang, professor of electrical engineering at the UW. “And especially like you said about the transmission system.”
Dr. Zhang says the bomb cyclone brought hurricane-like winds to parts of Western Washington.
KIRO 7 saw the deadly result as trees fell on and through roofs. Dr. Zhang says the impact was felt across the Eastside when the transmission system went down.
“First, they cause a lot of disruptions,” says Dr. Zhang. “They feed (power) to a lot of people and it takes a while to fix them.”
He says this means local utilities will likely have to take that into account in the future.
“If we expect these types of storms to become more common,” said Dr. Zhang. “We need to think about hardening the system.”
PSE said in an email that they have restored most of their 400 miles of transmission lines since the storm passed through. These are the lines over the Cascades that can only be seen from a helicopter.
But for now, the power is back on in this neighborhood and Thanksgiving is back on track.
