WHATCOM COUNTY, Wash. — Forecasters with the National Weather Service Seattle office extended their wind advisory to continue from 8pm until 11pm this evening, September 17th. Weather models have been showing a potential for the strongest winds to occur late tonight. The NWS advisory says to expect sustained south winds of 25 To 35mph with gusts up to 50mph.
Wind gusts around Whatcom County have been reported below 40mph. But firefighters, law enforcement and other emergency crews were busy responding to over a dozen reported electrical emergencies between 8am and 6pm today that have mostly been the result of downed trees into power lines. Correspondingly, there have been several localized outages across the County.
As of 6pm, Puget Sound Energy reported over 15,000 customer addresses in Whatcom County were without power and over 37,000 were without across all of the Puget Sound region.
Notable outages in Whatcom County as of 6pm included the following (# impacted shown within parentheses).
- West Ferndale (1,953)
- South Ferndale extending to Lummi Island (1,747)
- Neptune Beach, Sandy Point and Sandy Point Heights (1,076)
- Bellingham lettered streets and surrounding area (2,136)
- Fairhaven, Edgemoor and Happy Valley (3,237)
- Sudden Valley (2,769)
- Lynden (1,501)