Thousands of Thurston County residents without power Wednesday due to overnight windstorm
Thousands of Thurston County residents woke up to find their power out Wednesday following an overnight windstorm.
The National Weather Service issued a wind advisory for the region earlier this week after forecasting a weak atmospheric river impacting western Washington Tuesday into Wednesday.
Overnight data indicated the wind gusts topped at 49 miles per hour at the Olympia Regional Airport at 11:10 p.m. Tuesday.
About 2.4 inches of rain fell on the Olympia area Tuesday — the highest amount recorded this month so far, according to NWS data.
Puget Sound Energy showed dozens of scattered outages, large and small, in the Thurston County area. In a storm alert, PSE said damaging winds caused the outages and work crews were deploying to assignments Wednesday morning.
“We understand how difficult it is to be without power, especially during the holiday season,” the PSE alert says. “Our crews are working as quickly as they can to safely assess damage and make repairs to equipment.
“Unsafe weather conditions and the inability to access areas due to damage caused by the storm can slow these efforts,” the alert says.
Notably, PSE disabled outage notifications via email, text and automated calls so it could make improvements to its online outage map. However, PSE says the public can still report outages on their map and phone app.
Olympia area residents got a respite from the storm Wednesday morning, with partly sunny skies. But rain was expected again overnight into Thursday.
Rain will likely continue through the weekend with high temperatures in the low 50s and lows in the low 40s. However, there were no additional wind advisories for the near term as of Wednesday.
The aftermath of the storm affected a few schools in the area.
The Olympia School District’s McLane Elementary canceled school Wednesday because of a power outage.
Littlerock Elementary of the Tumwater School District started 2 hours late Wednesday and canceled before-school care.
Elma, McCleary and Satsop school districts started classes 2 hours late Wednesday morning. Out-of-district transportation was canceled in Elma and Satsop. Morning preschool was canceled in Elma and McCleary.
This story was originally published December 18, 2024 at 11:01 AM.
