The entire West End lost power for seven hours Tuesday because of a tree falling onto a power line near West Twin Road a few miles north of the west end of Lake Crescent.
Each of the Clallam County Public Utility District’s 3,600 West End customers lost power at about 9:30 a.m., when a small landslide caused the tree to fall on the 115,000-volt power line power line owned by Bonneville Power Administration, said David Proebstel, chief engineer.
Power was restored at 4:32 p.m. when a BPA crew from Olympia removed the tree and re-energized the line, he said.
Proebstel said the PUD had offered to do the work itself.
Port Angeles also had a small power outage Tuesday morning when a conductor shorted out, said Glenn Cutler, city public works and utilities director.
Cutler said about 630 customers near Eighth Street between Peabody and Race streets lost power for 23 minutes.
West End backup
Forks Mayor Nedra Reed said the town was disrupted little by its power outage.
Reed said the hospital, City Hall, police and fire departments, the jail and some local businesses had backup power up and running.
“We kind of have to plan for these sort of outages,” she said.
“This is almost like standard operating procedure for us.”
Reed said the city wasn’t expecting to use its emergency operations center at the Forks Community Center because power was expected to be restored by the end of the day.
She said power outages have become less frequent for Forks in the last couple of years because of work done by the PUD.
“We have little control to what happens on the BPA main service lines,” Reed added.
Proebstel said the fallen tree was discovered by a PUD employee in an airplane chartered from Rite Bros. Aviation Inc. at William R. Fairchild International Airport in Port Angeles.
He said a larger slide, several hundred feet across, in the same area caused another power outage last year.
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Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or at tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.
