PORT TOWNSEND — Jefferson County PUD reported that a power outage, beginning around 12:30 p.m., affected 17,500 customers Tuesday.
At 2:28 p.m., all but around 200 customers in the Park ridge area, near the airport, were back online, said Jameson Hawn, the PUD’s Digital Communications Specialist. By about 2:45 p.m., all customers were back online, he added.
“The cause; someone, and we haven’t determined who, was trimming along our transmission corridor near the Jefferson County Airport,” Hawn said. “In the process, they appeared to cut guy-wires to our transmission poles
Guy-wires are the braided structural wires that help support the poles, Hawn said.
“When they severed the guy-line, it sprung a line, because they’re tensioned, up into the transmission line, which caused the fault,” Hawn said.
Crew’s were replacing the guy-line on Tuesday afternoon, Hawn said.
The utility gained their first reference point for the failure using their Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, Hawn said.
“It kind of takes us to a root, but we still have to do line patrols to find the potential fault,” Hawn said. “It will give you a starting point, but that only give you a point to go in two directions.”
Hawn said crews traced the fault back to the Irondale substation where two reclosers had opened.
“The reclosers that protect our systems, our transformers opened up,” Hawn said. “That’s what caused the outage to our other substations in the area. Once you lose one, the others kind of trickle down with it.”
The Irondale substation, which tripped the larger outage, is located about 1 and 1/2 away from the severed guy-wire.
The area of the outage spanned from mid-county to Port Townsend.
Jeffcom 911 Operations Supervisor Marlo Erwick said that call center had been inundated with calls since the outage began. She said that the PUD, not Jeffcom 911, is the correct entity to call when seeking information on an outage.
