An 80 MPH wind gust was recorded tonight, December 6th, about 7:30pm at a Ferndale weather station. Even so, Puget Sound Energy has been limited to responding to arching wires, transformer explosions, etc. but mostly in the foothills many miles east of Ferndale. The closest power outage began impacting over 50 PSE customers in Lynden about 7:15pm.
As of the time this article was posted, no outages had been reported by PSE in the Ferndale area while the wind storm that the National Weather Service forewarned hasn’t failed to achieve expectations. Although, according to radio transmissions from What-Comm police and fire dispatch, PSE is not able to give out estimations for when they would be able to respond to the earlier mentioned issues “due to high call volumes.”
The high winds are expected to diminish after midnight, according the NWS’s most recent revision of their High Winds Warning.
This article will be updated should conditions change or outages occur.
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Click for more informationUPDATE 11pm
Fortunately, PSE workers are doing a great job staying on top of the outages. The large outage on Portal Way and Griffintown has since been restored. As has the downtown outage. Unfortunately, there remain several localized outages in the Ferndale area including one impacting nearly 300 PSE customers around the Sandy Point area.
Wind gusts continue to remain strong and not showing signs of letting up yet. The forecast is for them to die off after midnight. But at this time, gusts in the 60 to 65 MPH range continue to hit Ferndale.
UPDATE 10:25pm
Reports of traffic lights out by the I-5 and Main Street interchange. The outage along Portal Way from Griffintown northward continues. A localize outage was reported in the downtown neighborhood (now reported back on) and near the intersection of Olson Road and Thornton Road. The obligatory two-hour estimates to restore power have been given but considering how busy the folks at PSE are tonight, those are likely to slide to later times. A couple gusts in the 75 MPH range were recorded after 10pm.
UPDATE: 8:45pm
All we had to do was celebrate keeping the power on and, boom, it starts going out around Ferndale. Over 1,000 PSE customers are reportedly impacted by an outage in the area near Portal Way and Newkirk. There are a handful of much smaller outages as well.
There are still gusts being reported in excess of 60 MPH including a couple
UPDATE: 8pm
Report of a few small outages, most notably in the Custer area due to trees falling across wires. A fallen tree is reported to be blocking Thornton Street near Shannon Avenue. Don’t expect to get through there for a while.