Puget Sound Energy responded to nearly 500 calls in its 10-county service area and almost 7,000 outages in Whatcom County between Wednesday and Friday, Jan. 17–19, the final three days of a two-week winter storm that brought freezing temperatures and snow to the region.
Service calls peaked earlier, on Jan. 9, as freezing rain pelted the area, causing ice loading. Electrical lines were weighed down so heavily by ice, they could collapse without any external force hitting them, utility officials said. PSE could not provide data on service calls and outages for the rest of the winter storm period by publication time.
PSE also hit record demands for natural gas and electricity on Jan. 19, PSE spokesperson Melanie Coon said. PSE keeps crews on call and monitors more than 27,000 miles of electrical line to identify issues before they become outages, Coon added.
PSE said it also had support from multiple service providers to help perform functions such as outage investigation, damage assessment, vegetation management and power restoration.
A request sent to customers in all 10 counties on Jan. 13 urging conservation of natural gas was due to an outage at Jackson Prairie Gas Storage facility in Lewis County. The facility went offline in the early afternoon but returned by the evening, producing at 50-70% capacity during the outage. Additional customer conservation requests went out Jan. 14 and Jan. 22.
“The outage was caused by failed redundant cables,” Coon said. “The fiber optic network is like the nervous system in the human body — it sends control signals throughout the facility. Without a fiber optic network, the work at the facility can be more manual. We have redundant systems in place to help with back up.”
The conservation request was intended for the duration of the cold snap, but especially during the time the facility was offline.
