Crews battle to repair damaged system

Hundreds of thousands of Puget Sound residents may have to survive without electricity and heat through the weekend.

While power will be restored to many customers in the Seattle region by Sunday, people in the Cascade foothills and rural areas won't have power for three or more days, according to Seattle City Light and Puget Sound Energy.

Utility crews are working overtime to repair miles of transmission lines snapped by rain-sodden trees blown down by winds gusting to 70 mph.

As of this morning, about 533,000 customers were without electricity: 460,000 Puget Sound Energy, 60,000 City Light, and 13,000 Snohomish County Public Utility District customers.

The power system was particularly vulnerable because trees uproot easily in soil saturated by record rains.

"Wind and trees are enemies of the power system," Seattle City Light Superintendent Jorge Carrasco said.

The storm knocked out more than half of PSE's 160 high-voltage transmission lines — the large power lines that transfer power from dams and other sources to neighborhood substations, said Dorothy Bracken, a spokeswoman for Puget Sound Energy.

City Light spokesman Peter Clarke said crews will likely restore most of the power by midnight tonight, but pockets of Seattle may still be without power Sunday.

Much of Seattle and the Eastside, and all of Whidbey Island, lost power.

Clarke said more customers were without power than in the 1993 storm that hit Seattle during the first inauguration of President Clinton, when 110,000 City Light customers lost power.

PSE sent helicopters into the air Friday morning to assess damage to hundreds of miles of high-voltage transmission lines and determine how to get to remote sites, Bracken said.

One line from Rocky Reach Dam in Chelan County, which supplies power to Western Washington, was badly damaged by the winds. Workers used Snow Cats to climb through the snowy, mountainous terrain to fix it.

PSE deployed more than 200 crews, bringing in workers from eastern Washington, Idaho, Nevada and California. About 135 more crews were being called from as far away as Canada and Wyoming.

In Seattle, Clarke said, at least 200 City Light workers are repairing the backbone of the system: feeder lines and substations.

No City Light transmission lines — which run from the generators to substations — are down. However, 65 feeder lines — which carry electricity from substations to other substations as well as to neighborhoods — were severely damaged by fallen trees. These are the first lines being repaired.

Critical areas, such as hospitals running on their own generators, are the highest priority, utility officials said.

Children's, Providence and Swedish hospitals had no power and were still running on their generators Friday evening.

City Light work crews hadn't even assessed the power lines that run house to house in neighborhoods, Clarke said. These will be the last to be repaired, he said.

The first outages in Seattle were reported at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, and crews responded but were pulled off the streets after midnight Friday morning when 50 mph winds whipped through the area, Clarke said.

"We didn't have crews out because it was dangerous and they can't work up high and in their buckets when wind is blowing and trees were down," he said.

"At midnight it cascaded from 3,000 [customer outages] to 15,000 to 30,000 to 50,000 to 100,000, and by 4 a.m. we were at 170,000 outages," he said.

By dawn Friday, City Light crews were sent back out on the streets.

The Snohomish County PUD allowed its crews to continue working as long as they felt conditions were safe, a PUD spokesman said.

Crews there have worked virtually nonstop since Snohomish County's flooding last month.

"You know they're tired," said Bob Holt, a PUD distribution service manager in Arlington. "But they're also dedicated, and that's why they're still out there."

PUD officials have another worry: dwindling supplies. The PUD was expecting much-needed shipments of copper wire to arrive by air freight Friday morning. But canceled flights at Sea-Tac International Airport have hindered its arrival. The PUD hopes the wire will be delivered today.

PSE repair crews worked from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday, making smaller repairs, but workers stopped later that night because fierce winds made it too dangerous to work, PSE said.

"Trees were falling down, huge chunks of limbs were falling off, as well as power lines," Bracken said.

Damage likely would have reoccurred even if repairs had been made, Bracken said.

At the storm's peak, more than 1.1 million homes and businesses lost power. Two-thirds of PSE customers — 700,000 — had no power. More than half of Seattle City Light customers — 175,000 — had no power. And 300,000 Snohomish PUD customers were in the dark.

Staff reporter Sharon Chan contributed to this report.

Steve Miletich: 206-464-3302 or smiletich@seattletimes.com