By Snohomish County PUD

The Snohomish County PUD works tirelessly to provide reliable power for all of our customer-owners across the county and Camano Island.

Unfortunately, due to wild weather, equipment failure or other reasons outside of our control, sometimes the power does go out. When that happens, we rely on you to report your outage on our online outage map at outagemap.snopud.com.

We recently made some upgrades to our outage map. These improvements will provide you with the most up-to-date information about your outage.

Now, while reporting an outage on our outage map, you can opt-in to text alerts that will provide updates throughout the outage. You will be informed that we are aware of the outage, about details of its cause, when a crew is dispatched and when we estimate power will be restored.

Once the power is back on, we encourage customers to take a brief, three-question survey so we can get feedback and make future improvements.

You can also report an outage by calling our automated outage reporting phone line at 425-783-1001 and sign up for text updates by keying in your phone number.

Initial feedback has been very positive. More than 73% of customers reporting their outages have opted in to text alerts. The outage texts are receiving high satisfaction marks from 75% of those who sign up, with many of them leaving comments praising the PUD.

“We wear C-Paps to breathe while we sleep. I stop breathing 40 seconds out of (every) 60, so with no power, I’m actually afraid to sleep and die suffocating,” read one comment we received after a recent outage. “So, when I tell you I appreciate you, believe me I really do. Thank you.”

More improvements are coming to the outage map and the PUD. Now, during storms and larger outage events, we can post update messages to our outage map. These messages will keep customers informed and will also be sent as a text message to customers who have signed up to receive them. They can also be targeted at specific regions or incidents.

In the future, our new meters, installed through our Connect Up program, will alert us of a power outage immediately, speeding up restoration efforts. This new capability will also make our outage map more effective and informative in the coming years.

Our mission statement promises that “we deliver affordable power and water to our customer-owners in a safe, environmentally sustainable and reliable manner …” We hope the new improvements to our outage map will continue that long-standing tradition as we remain committed to meeting the needs — and providing reliable power — to the communities we serve.