Weather-related problems dogged the North Olympic Peninsula this morning as the Hood Canal Bridge closed and reopened twice while thousands were left without power in both Clallam and Jefferson counties.
State Department of Transportation officials cited high winds when they closed the 7,900-foot floating span linking Jefferson and Kitsap counties at 3:30 a.m., reopened it at 6:23 a.m., then closed it again at 7:59 a.m. The bridge was reopened to traffic again at 10:20 a.m.
Late night windstorms in east Jefferson County left more than 6,000 customers without power this morning, with the lights not expected to come back on until the afternoon.
Jefferson County Public Utility District No. 1 manager Jim Parker said that the wind-related outages affect about a third of the service area and are the result of multiple trees falling onto power lines.
Areas without power include a large portion of Port Townsend, Beckett Point, Cape George, Marrowstone Island, Port Ludlow and half of Irondale, Parker said.
“We expect to get all of the major areas back by the afternoon, but it may take two or three days to take care of all of the onesies and twosies.”
Parker said the two PUD crews have been mobilized and that three additional crews would arrive later in the day.
The Jefferson County Courthouse and Port Townsend City Hall are closed to the public today because of the outage.
Grant Street Elementary School and the Port Townsend High School have power, while Blue Heron Middle School lost power and closed for the day. The Chimacum School District is closed for the day.
In Clallam today, the county Public Utility District restored power by 9:26 a.m. to most of the more than 1,500 West End- and Sequim-area customers who had lost lights beginning Wednesday afternoon.
Meanwhile, outages that affected 1,533 PUD customers beginning at 4:10 p.m. Wednesday were resolved for all but about 200 customers by about 9:45 a.m. today, PUD spokesman Michael Howe said.
There remained isolated outages in the Forks area, while 67 customers in the Sekiu area also lacked electricity.
In the Port Angeles area, several customers off of O’Brien were without power.
And in the Sequim area, 115 customers on Lost Mountain were without power, as well as several isolated cases in the Sequim area.
“When there are weather-related events like this, it is difficult to pinpoint one cause for all outages,” Howe said in an email.
“Generally tree limbs or trees themselves fall on lines and cause the outages.
“All outages were weather related though, and I did not see any that were not caused by something other than high winds or trees (the nature of where we live).”
