SEATTLE — Seattle City Light says electricity customers downtown cut their power usage by about 3 megawatts in response to an energy pinch.
Workers were doing maintenance on two banks of transformers at the Union Street substation on Friday when another two failed. That left the substation with just two of its six transformer banks working.
Peak demand on the substation can reach 100 megawatts, but the substation’s capacity was just 80 megawatts. That had utility officials concerned, and they asked downtown customers to cut their power usage to avoid a blackout.
By Friday afternoon four of the six transformer banks were working, ensuring there would be enough power to supply the area through the weekend.
The Union Street substation serves 2,400 customers — many of them office towers — on more than 70 downtown blocks.
Friday Harbor: New orca calf spotted
The Center for Whale Research on Washington’s San Juan Island says a new baby orca has been spotted.
The calf was seen Tuesday off the west side of San Juan Island. It has been designated L-111, the next number in sequence for members of L pod, a group of about 44 orcas that frequents the San Juans and parts of Puget Sound. The calf is the sixth baby born to L-47, a 34-year-old female nicknamed “Marina.”
The new calf has two sisters, “Moonlight” and “Muncher.” Moonlight had a calf of her own last year.
Researchers say Marina was seen without a calf on Monday, so the baby may only be a few days old.
Poulsbo: Woman jailed for beating fiance
A Poulsbo woman was jailed after being accused of beating up her fiance at their prenuptial party.
Kitsap County sheriff’s deputies say 31-year-old Amber Barnes’ 12-year-old son told her he saw her fiance kissing one of her female friends early Thursday morning.
Deputies say Barnes gave her friends the boot, told her fiance to leave, too, and then started hitting him in the face.
When he left the house, they say, she tackled him football-style, punched him some more, threw his watch into the bushes and broke his glasses.
Responding to a 911 call from her son, deputies arrested Barnes for investigation of fourth-degree assault.
Sheriff’s Lt. Kathy Collings said Barnes was released from jail later Thursday. There’s no word on whether the marriage took place.
Wenatchee: $127 million in pot seized
Marijuana plants estimated to be worth more than $127 million have been seized in Chelan County this month, and authorities say the growers are getting higher.
Placing their illegal farms at higher elevations, that is.
About 24,000 mature pot plants were seized at four sites in the county Wednesday, a day after marijuana valued at nearly $48 million was destroyed in the Ross Lake National Recreation Area in far eastern Whatcom County.
Total seizures in Chelan County this month amount to 84,873 plants, each 5 to 6 feet tall and believed to be worth about $1,500.
No arrests were reported.
On Tuesday authorities seized 20,000 plants on land owned by Longview Fibre near Lake Wenatchee.
The pot farms are mostly on public forest land and feature precise irrigation systems as well as other indications that the operations are carefully tended, sheriff’s Lt. Jerome Moore said.
“These grows are in a lot higher elevation than in the past, where we’ve normally located marijuana,” Moore said.
“More than likely it’s one group that is rotating in and out of each one of these grows because they all have camps, they all have bed areas, they all have cooking areas and they usually have firearms,” he added. “There’s strong evidence that they’ll go from one camp to the next.”
West of the Cascade Range, personnel from nine law enforcement agencies destroyed 15,742 plants near Ross Lake. More than 1,000 pounds of garbage, fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, irrigation pipes and propane canisters were removed.
“This is the first known marijuana grow site within a National Park Service site in Washington and the first one in Western Washington,” said Lt. Richard Wiley, narcotics chief in the Washington State Patrol.
The site, spotted by the pilot of a helicopter of the National Park Service, closely resembles marijuana cultivations blamed on Mexican traffickers at national parks in California, according to a park news release.
Hanford: Nuclear waste tank not leaking
A leak has been ruled out as the cause for a drop in the level of highly radioactive waste in a tank at the Hanford nuclear reservation.
Instead, Energy Department officials and contractors say, variations in the level of the liquid apparently are linked to the installation of a vertical pipe in Tank SX-104. The pipe was added in December to help measure waste levels in the huge tank.
The finding is good news for Hanford, where an equipment malfunction has halted work at the only tank where radioactive waste was being retrieved. Waste from 142 older, leak-prone, single-shell tanks is being transferred to 28 newer and more secure double-shell tanks.
Officials said there was also a false alarm for Tank SX-104 in 1988.
Oregon: Columbia River bacteria test
A team of microbiologists from Seattle is in Hood River, Ore., this week, sampling Columbia River water between Arlington and Cascade Locks.
They are looking for any bacteria that might be behind the mysterious ailment that windsurfers and kiteboarders have dubbed “river nose.”
The Environmental Protection Agency will test the samples looking for five kinds of bacteria, including E. coli and enterococcus.
Those bacteria cause different symptoms reported by windsurfers, including respiratory and gastrointestinal problems, plus cuts and sores that are slow to heal.
The test results are expected by October.
Associated Press
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