It was August 29th last year and a wind storm was forecast. But few could have expected it would result in so much damage, days without power and canceled events.
When the sun came up this morning there was a breeze from the southeast. But the winds suddenly began picking up and, shortly after 10am, gusts up to 37mph had been recorded at a weather station by Ferndale High School. These conditions are similar enough to those the morning of August 29th, 2015 to bring back memories of the day of last year’s summer windstorm.
That day, the National Weather Service upgraded their Wind Advisory to a Wind Warning as gusts reached 40mph by 9:30am and continued to climb, reaching over 60mph by 11:30am.
The high winds wrecked havoc on trees weakened by months of drought, bringing them down on power lines all over the region and blocking roads.
Click for more informationOrganizers of the Ferndale Street Festival and the Muds to Suds obstacle course event were forced to cancel with little to no advance notice due to the high winds and resulting debris coming down from the weakened trees.
By the next morning, over 7800 businesses and homes in the Ferndale area were reported without power by Puget Sound Energy. Some waited over 4 days to see their power finally restored as PSE crews were stretched thin responding to outages around the region.
As of 11am today, there have been no reports of damage, road closures or power outages in the Ferndale area as a result of the winds.
UPDATE 11:05am
Just as this article was being published, there was a report of power wires down across a driveway on Lummi Island which, according to PSE, causing a power outage impacting 237 of their customers.