Capitol Hill residents working remotely during the area’s COVID-19 response might be finding it more difficult to be productive in their impromptu “home offices” again Wednesday. A lingering power outage in the densely populated POWHAT — Pine-Olive Way-Harvard Ave Triangle — area is lingering into a second day.
City Light says “equipment failure” is to blame but we haven’t heard back on specifics. People in the neighborhood say the outage has ranged from more than 800 customers to just over 200 out Wednesday morning. City Light currently lists an 11 AM estimated time for restoration of service while the “south line” in the area is returned to service.
Power first snapped off in the area around 1 PM Tuesday.
In the early waves of Capitol Hill’s surge in redevelopment during the 2010s, CHS reported on the “surprisingly low demands” of the development boom and Capitol Hill’s improving infrastructure that accompanied big transit investments like Capitol Hill Station and the infrastructure upgrades that came along with new construction including the undergrounding of many utilities including power lines.
While much of Capitol Hill has been steadily transformed with the waves of new development, the dense POWHAT core is home to many of the neighborhood’s older buildings. Still, there were some reports from neighbors that construction in the area was to blame for the initial Tuesday outage. We’ll add more when we hear back from City Light.
UPDATE 4:28 PM: Seattle City Light reports the outage issues are taken care of. The first episode stemmed from an underground cable failure. “The cause is actually why it can take a while to fix. The underground electrical system is a bit complex, and unlike overhead power lines, crews often cannot immediately see along the line where the issue originates,” a SCL representative tells CHS. “So it can take longer to investigate and find the point of failure. In this case, once they found the point of failure, they then had to pull through new cable before restoring power.”
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WORK FROM YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD LOCAL COFFEE SHOP THAT IS OWNED BY A SMALL BUSINESS OWNER. THEY’RE PROBABLY WORKING THE COUNTER, RIGHT NOW!!!
— This is Bernie Sanders and I approve this shouting 💜
Latest system status is saying 12:50 restoration time which would put this outage at nearly 24 hours. With only 5 outages in the city and fair weather you’d think SCL could do a better job of fixing this.
My power came back on at 915am and abruptly shut off again at 230.
FYI, POWHAT has been a name for close to 20 years – it was a neighborhood list-serv and community council that actively met up until the Capitol Hill Community Council was reinvigorated around 2009/2010 – all fallen by the wayside now as the neighborhood changes, etc.
lol it was on a list serve 10 years ago and circulated among 30 people!
do people ever realize how silly they sound?
Nobody ever refers to this area as POWHAT, among many other reasons is it’s not clear exactly what geographical boundaries it’s even attempting to describe. Acronyms work when they are catchy and do that.
See: DUMBO, SODO, NOLITA, TriBeCa and so on.
Quit trying to make “fetch” happen.
It isn’t going to happen.
from what i’ve been seeing, “work from home” is a playful euphemism for “go out to eat/drnik and have fun”.
Hi. I was one of the people who started the “POWHat”council and listserve etc. Great to seesime remembers. We accomplished some good things while we were around. The name is Pine-Olive Way-Harvard ave triangle, which seems pretty specific. Have a great day!
to *see someone* remembers
Thanks for the reminder. CORRECTION being made above! :) (This is what happens when you try to do things from memory)