Thousands of customers were without power in the neighborhoods around northern Capitol Hill Monday morning as a swarm of electricity outages hit Seattle and the Puget Sound under gusty winds following a day of record June rain.
Seattle City LIght said more than 7,000 customers were impacted by the Capitol Hill-area outage between Volunteer Park and E Madison. Crews were investigating the cause. City Light’s most recent estimate restoration listed a hopeful 11 AM target.
More than 20,000 customers were reported without power across the city
You can view current outages and status reports here.
The windy conditions were wreaking havoc on water-logged, leafy trees and wires.
The Capitol Hill power failure was first reported around 4:45 AM.
A transformer fire was reported on E Alder and wires down on E Yesler later in the morning.
15th Ave E, meanwhile, was blocked to traffic including Metro Route 10 by a downed tree across both lanes near E Prospect.
The conditions have made for a trickier than usual Monday morning on the city’s streets. Drivers are reminded that intersections without functioning signals are to be treated as all-way stops.
Seattle Public Schools had not made any announcements about delays or cancellations as of just before 8 AM.
UPDATE 8 AM: The Hill-area outage has been reduced to around 3,700 customers. Restoration remains estimated for 11 AM.
UPDATE x2: The roadway has been reported cleared on 15th Ave E.
UPDATE x3: With just over 2,800 customers still without power in the Capitol Hill-area outage, Seattle City Light has provided a revised service restoration of 9 PM.
Meany Middle School and Stevens Elementary announced their school days were continuing despite the ongoing outage.
UPDATE x4: Seattle City Light says it has a doozy of a repair on its hands to bring the Capitol Hill outage to a close.
“Multiple wires and cross arms were damaged early this morning due to loose vegetation and wind gusts,” a spokesperson tells CHS.
The spokesperson said the main damage occurred near 15th Ave E and E Olive St.
The SCL representative says the work is requiring “multiple crews” to complete “these complex repairs.”
The spokesperson said the work is expected to be completed around 10 PM “barring any unforeseen delays.”
UPDATE x5: That’s progress. SCL reports the outage is down to just over 1,000 customers as of just before 6 PM.
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Sigh Always the same area with the city light 19th century equipment and above ground.
Every time! Every time we get a little wind this happens. Modernize the damn lines! It’s only going to get windier and windier.
When we moved here 20 years ago, our new neighbors told us the city planned to bury residential lines. Will it ever happen?
8 hours w/o power and counting on N Capitol Hill. 🤬
You think you are 🤬 … we used to be the first house on the first transformer away from the substation… until something blew up underground (like a serious boom that woke up the whole neigherbood and we all came out to see smoke coming out of the man holes…) and we were put on a back-fed line from you all (ostensibly until ours is completely fixed..). They’ve strung all the new lines, but for whatever reason it’s not been switched back yet… so every time one of your branches falls we go out too.. and we’re now the last house on the line and the last one to get our power back on.. and everyone just south of us still has their heat and lights. 😤
I am so tired of how this keeps happening to our block and environs and it never gets solved.
Considering the amount of property tax people in the affected area pay, it’s really alarming that the infrastructure is so unreliable.
The power lines in my part of north Capitol Hill are underground, but we’re still out of power because they go above ground somewhere.
thank you seattle city light workers, i saw you working hard fixing lines. our infrastructure sucks but thanks for your hard work getting power back