PORT LUDLOW — A Puget Sound Energy official was apologetic to the company’s many Port Ludlow residents left without power for up to three days following a Feb. 4 storm that ravaged much of the North Olympic Peninsula.
“We need to do a better job, and we will do a better job,” said Greg Zeller, Puget Sound Energy director of operations.
Puget Sound Energy representatives attended Thursday’s monthly Port Ludlow Village Council meeting to explain to the packed house the reasons why 3,000 Port Ludlow residents were without power.
The meeting called by power company officials, who gave about 100 people a chance to listen and ask why power was down for so long, and what’s being done to prevent a long outage from happening again.
In total, about 140,000 Puget Sound Energy customers lost power for some time following the storm, but Port Ludlow was one of the last communities to have power restored.
‘Shouldn’t be dead last’
“This is a senior citizen community, and we shouldn’t be dead last,” said Bob O’Leary of South Bay Community in Port Ludlow and former president of a California utility company.
“There are people here who have life-threatening illnesses. You have to have alternative methods of restoring energy to us.”
“If you were dead last, it’s because there was that much damage,” Zeller said in response.
“It wasn’t that you were a low priority.”
