EVERETT — The afternoon surge in Tuesday’s windstorm sent debris, branches and even whole trees crashing into power lines around Snohomish County, plunging more than 150,000 customers into darkness.
The storm was one of the most devastating in Snohomish County PUD’s history. Public Utility District crews responding to downed lines found “total chaos,” said one PUD worker.
Dozens of utility crews and support teams have been working to repair damaged equipment and downed lines since the windstorm started Tuesday. Many worked 24-hour-long shifts before stopping to rest.
By late Wednesday afternoon, the PUD had restored power to all but about 45,000 customers. It could take to the weekend to get power back to everyone, district spokesman Neil Neroutsos said.
“It is our intention to restore power as quickly and safely as possible,” he said.
At first, the storm knocked out power in relatively small pockets, mostly between Lynnwood and Marysville. In most cases, those early outages were quickly repaired and power restored, he said.
Stronger gusts that ripped through Snohomish County on Tuesday afternoon caused more severe damage, including breaks in nine transmission lines. Two substations also were knocked offline.
Even the PUD’s headquarters building in downtown Everett lost power “periodically,” he said.
At the peak, about half of the PUD’s 332,000 customers were without power.
That makes Tuesday’s storm tied with the 1993 Inauguration Day Storm as the second worst in the PUD’s history. First place belongs to this year’s Aug. 29 windstorm that left about 175,000 customers without power in Snohomish County and on Camano Island.
Tuesday night “was like a war zone,” said Forest Bigenho. The PUD substation maintenance engineer worked as a utility contractor for the U.S. military in Turkey near the Iraq border during the first Gulf War and for several years following.
After starting his shift at 8 p.m. Tuesday, he spent the night assessing damage reports. Windblown debris, splintered utility poles, snapped power lines and burning tree branches often littered the sites, he said.
Like many PUD field workers, he said, he expected his shift to last at least 24 hours. The contract crew he was overseeing had been working since 7 a.m. Tuesday, when they started in Blaine, he said.
The contract crew — with DJ’s Electrical from Battle Ground — arrived in Snohomish County that evening.
On Wednesday afternoon, the crew was repairing three broken power lines in an alley in central Everett. The lines were typical for a residential area, carrying a 12,470 volt charge.
“If you got hit with this, it could throw you across the alley” and kill you, Bigenho said.
Repair crews can’t rush safety procedures, he said.
“If we’re a little slow, it’s because we are being thorough. It’s their lives,” he said, pointing toward the contractors working in the alley.
Anyone who finds a downed line, should treat it as if it is live — staying at least 30 feet back — and report it to the PUD, he said.
In the alley in Everett, the crew from DJ’s Electrical and PUD workers first had to isolate the damaged section from the rest of the grid, so the lines would not be live wires. That would allow the workers to safely repair the lines, Bigenho said.
Field work is closely coordinated with dispatchers and system administrators in the command room at the PUD’s operations center near Paine Field.
It is where the PUD makes sense of the flood of reports that come in during big storms.
Desks with banks of computer screens face 20-foot-tall maps of the Snohomish County PUD’s power grid covering the room’s far wall. A printer spits out cards each time a customer reports a downed line or other damage. Radios chatter with reports from field crews. Phones ring with calls from emergency management agencies and other PUD staff members. Lights flash on computer screens and alarms ring.
The room really got busy when the stronger gusts hit in the afternoon.
That’s when “we really got hammered,” said Jim Dotson, who helps coordinate the PUD’s response from the command room at the operations center.
The gusts “knocked out” significant parts of the PUD power grid’s backbone, he said.
“It’s pretty much been at that pace since then,” he said.
Dan Catchpole: 425-339-3454; dcatchpole@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @dcatchpole.
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