About 1:35pm, people nearby reported hearing a loud explosion and saw a power line that had went down on the northeast corner of the intersection of Slater Road and Lake Terrell Road. Crews from Whatcom County Fire District 7 were dispatched soon after for a grass fire in the area and Puget Sound Energy reported 1,000 of their customers were without power in the vicinity.
Miles away and further into town, Ferndale neighbors between the Poplar neighborhood and the Ferndale Terrace neighborhood reported being without power beginning at the same time. No official word if that outage was related. Power was restored to these areas after about 45 minutes.
The 1,000 PSE customers impacted are in the Sandy Point and Sandy Point Heights neighborhoods (see graphic below). As of 2:45pm, PSE was estimating power would be restored by 4pm. (UPDATE: as of 6:40pm, the estimate remains at 10pm)
The outage was initially reported as caused by a truck snagging the power line but people nearby say the line was too high for a truck to have snagged it. They speculated construction activity further down Slater Road may have put tension on the line, causing it to break. UPDATE: PSE has assigned the cause to equipment failure.
