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“Winds are the wild card,” Puget Sound Energy spokesman Roger Thompson said. “There are a lot of very fragile branches and limbs hanging by a shred of bark.”
Scattered new outages were reported Tuesday afternoon and early evening.
“We expect the overwhelming majority of people in Thurston County to have power by sometime on Wednesday,” Thompson said.
He said there are about 500 linemen in the county and crews will work around the clock until power is restored to the last customer.
The last pockets will likely be in the Rochester, Johnson Point and Nisqually areas, Thompson said.
He urged people who think they may have been overlooked to call the reporting line – 1-888-225-5773 – and follow the menu through. “You will reach a live person,” he said.
Thompson said he knows it can be frustrating to see power on in neighboring streets and emphasized, “No one is being overlooked. No neighborhood is more or less important.”
He said the first repair efforts were focused on major transmission lines. Then crews moved on to substations, and from there out to the network supplying neighborhoods and eventually to individual service lines. PSE has restored power to 394,000 customers in Western Washington since the snow began, he said.
