Wind and rain leave thousands in the dark



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At its peak, a storm left more than 114,000 Puget Sound Energy customers without power.

But that number has plummeted, with crews focusing on hardest-hit South King County.

A PSE team worked hard at Federal Way. But at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, there was good news. The crew energized a line and finished their work.

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Indeed, before that happened, there were five separate outages at Federal Way. So it took a lot of work to get everyone back online.

It was a familiar sight in southern King County during the first major storm of the fall season.

Puget Sound Energy crews worked tirelessly to restore power to tens of thousands of customers, sometimes doing the hard work amid the downpours. Electricity for PSE customers began to cut off after 10 p.m. on Friday.

In the Pine Lake neighborhood of Sammamish, a neighbor says she heard a loud boom, then darkness.

“I think it was local,” Jaime Daniel said, “like the circuit box, something that sits on the corner of our cul-de-sac.”

But Daniel says his family is lucky, as they ran their hand along a machine that was buzzing loudly in their backyard.

“Have it serviced once a year, keep it in good shape,” she said. “It’s my baby.”

Her “baby” is a built-in automatic generator that previous owners installed before moving in just two years ago.

“It’s probably happened to us about five, six times already in the two years we’ve been here,” Daniel said.

Moments later, the sky seemed to open, the rain falling in patches.

Then the drivers saw a much rarer sight in the Pacific Northwest, several lightning bolts in a very short period of time.

The ferocity of the well-deserved rain probably caught a lot of people off guard.

But after the historically hot and dry summer of 2021, it was probably a highly regarded sight.

Around 6:30 p.m. power was restored to all PSE customers except 19,000. And work will continue until power is restored to everyone.



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