FORKS — More than 5,000 customers were without power for more than 14 hours after two trees were blown down in a windstorm northwest of Lake Crescent.
Nicole Clark, communications manager for the Clallam Public Utility District, said the outage hit at about 11 p.m. Sunday and that Bonneville Power Administration crews had power restored by 1:30 p.m. Monday.
Between 5,000 and 6,000 PUD customers were affected on the west side of Clallam County.
About 790 customers were affected in Neah Bay, 816 in Clallam Bay/Sekiu, 745 in the Beaver area, and more than 2,700 in the Forks area, according to the Clallam PUD’s online outage map.
Clark said a BPA crew arrived about three hours after the outage and began patrolling its lines.
“They were patrolling lines along logging roads in the dark,” she said.
Crews finally found a tree down into a line at about 10 a.m. Monday, 23 miles up a BPA line. Crew members briefly shut off power to the Joyce area about 11 a.m. to test the line and discovered another cause for the outage.
Clark said crews then found a second tree down into the line about a mile away.
Once that tree was removed, the line was re-energized at about 1 p.m., she said.
Meanwhile, Clallam PUD crews patrolled their lines and found limbs and branches down as well as wildlife that had caused smaller outages.
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Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be reached by email at plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
