EVERETT — After floods, snow and windstorms in 2006, and a wetter and colder than normal winter on the horizon, utilities and emergency responders are getting prepared.
Today, the Snohomish County PUD is holding a free Winter Wise Expo workshop for customers offering advice on trimming trees, electrical safety and installing and running portable generators.
Damage from storms in late 2006 cost the PUD and its customers $12 million and caused tens of thousands of residents to lose their power for days at a time.
“Last year was an important reminder to all of us that we need to be better prepared, and that includes having gas in your car, water on hand, flashlights with batteries and all of the things you need if you are going to be without electricity,” said Neil Neroutsos, a spokesman for PUD.
The workshop is just part of the public utility’s efforts to get ahead of the bad weather.
This year, it is building a new eight-mile-long transmission line connecting Lake Goodwin and Stanwood that will allow the utility to reroute electricity around an outage, giving the vulnerable region a much-needed backup.
It also launched an “aggressive” tree-trimming effort this summer, focusing on Camano Island, which suffered some of the worst damage during the 2006 storms, Neroutsos said. The utility spends about $5.6 million a year trimming trees along 500 miles of power lines.
After telephone lines became jammed with customer calls last year, the utility beefed up its automated answering system.
The new high-capacity phone system can handle up to 10,000 calls per hour. Customers can call 425-783-1000 to check the cause of power outages in their neighborhood and, in some cases, learn when power is expected to be restored.
The phone system also has a priority system that more efficiently routes reports of downed power lines to crews in the field.
Last year’s snow and wind storms were the most damaging and expensive storms in the utility’s history.
The first major outage of the year came just after Thanksgiving on Nov. 26 when a major storm dumped more than a foot of snow on Arlington, Stanwood and Camano Island, forcing the utility to dispatch snowmobiles to access some of the downed lines. The storm left 60,000 PUD customers without power at its peak.
A few weeks later, a Dec. 14 windstorm left 120,000 people in Snohomish County without electricity, and knocked out power to 1.2 million people in the region.
Meteorologist Ted Buehner with the National Weather Service’s Seattle bureau said cool sea temperatures in the tropics and other recent climate observations are prompting the Climate Prediction Center to forecast La Nina conditions this winter.
For Western Washington, that likely means cooler temperatures and more rain than normal.
To prepare, Buehner said a number of government agencies are talking with each other and sharing their plans on how to handle the winter’s weather.
The weather service recently completed a severe-storm drill in Seattle with Seattle City Light, the Seattle mayor’s office and a number of city agencies, including public works, transportation and the fire department.
It’s planning a similar simulated exercise with the state Department of Transportation on the Highway 520 floating bridge spanning Lake Washington, which transportation officials say could fail during a major windstorm or earthquake.
“This is probably the busiest fall I have ever had since I came here since 1994,” Buehner said. “Everybody is working hard to get their communities better prepared.”
Buehner said the weather service is always looking to improve its forecasts, but said if anyone was caught flatfooted by last year’s fierce storms, it was because they weren’t paying attention.
One way people can get a leg up on storms this year, he said, is to invest in a NOAA Weather Radio that works similar to a smoke detector.
The potentially life-saving radios are tied in with the Emergency Alert System around the clock, and sound a warning alarm and message during any number of emergencies or disasters, including floods, dangerous storms, tsunamis, volcanic activity, Amber child abduction alerts, terrorism events or earthquakes.
The radios range in price from around $50 to $150 and can be purchased at Joe’s, Fred Meyer, REI, Radio Shack and elsewhere.
Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429 or dchircop@heraldnet.com.
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