Winds whipping through the North Olympic Peninsula left about 10,000 Clallam County residents and about 136 Jefferson County residents without power early Monday.
The power outages happened at about 1 a.m. and most customers had power back by daylight in Clallam County, said Jeff Beaman, spokesman for Clallam County Public Utility District.
In Jefferson County outages occurred at about 1 a.m. — the height of the windstorm — and stretched until about 4 p.m., said Dorothy Bracken, spokeswoman for Puget Sound Energy, which provides power to East Jefferson County.
“Throughout our entire coverage area at the height of the outage, we had 40,000 people without power — with the vast majority of those in Thurston County,” she said.
“So in comparison to the rest of the area, our Jefferson County customers were not as hard hit.”
Bonneville line
Beaman said the majority of the Clallam outages were on the Bonneville Power Administration’s transmission line, which provides power to the Happy Valley Substation south of Sequim.
“I am not sure exactly what happened to those lines, but I’m told that it was a wind-related event,” he said.
“They are farther downstream than the ones that our crews work on.”
Most of the 10,000 customers who lost power were in the Sequim-Dungeness Valley, but scattered Clallam PUD customers in the Forks and Neah Bay areas were also blacked out by trees falling on lines, Beaman said.
The highest reported winds on the North Olympic Peninsula were in the Port Townsend area, said Dana Felton, meteorologist for the National Weather Service
“The peak winds there were 46 mph sustained with gusting up to 61 mph,” Felton said.
“We don’t have a recorded time with that but it was between the 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. time window.”
Washington State Ferries canceled all of the morning Port Townsend and Keystone sailings of the Steilacoom II across Admiralty Inlet until 11:30 a.m. because of the winds.
Port Angeles and Sequim were fairly sheltered, he said.
Wind speed
Winds in west Port Angeles reached 34 mph and in Sequim about 29 mph, both recorded about 3:30 a.m., he said.
Up in the mountains, however, winds were much stronger.
Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic National Park again lived up to its name with sustained winds of 68 mph and a maximum gust of 127 mph.
Forks and LaPush had gusts of about 60 mph at about 4 a.m., Felton said.
“It was fairly close to what we were expecting,” he said.
“We issued wind warnings for the coastal areas and an advisory for the interior very early, and that is pretty much what we saw.”
A National Weather Service warning predicts winds of 40 mph and gusts 60 mph and greater.
An advisory predicts winds at 30 mph and gusts of 45 mph and greater.
Low-pressure systems
Felton said that although two more low-pressure systems — which generally produce the storms and windy weather — are moving toward the Peninsula, the high winds aren’t expected to repeat themselves.
“We might see an advisory later this week,” he said, “but I don’t expect any warnings.”
The storms are about 100 to 200 miles off the coast on the Pacific Ocean, he said.
Although the highest winds were on the coast, Coast Guard Group/Air Station Port Angeles received no distress calls on Sunday night or Monday morning, dispatchers said.
On Vancouver Island, about 25,000 customers were without electricity during the windstorm, the Victoria Times Colonist reported on its Web site Monday morning.
The island saw winds between 50 and 60 mph, the newspaper said.
The Tacoma and Olympia areas had winds of about 40 mph with gusts up to 55 mph.
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladaily news.com.
