More than 65,440 Clark Public Utilities customers lost power this week as high winds battered Southwest Washington.
Arctic winds pounded Clark County on Tuesday and Wednesday with gusts exceeding 50 mph, knocking down trees and leaving thousands without electricity for days. The gusts leveled massive trunks and limbs, damaging houses and cars, blocking roadways and tugging down power lines.
In all, Clark County had more than 300 outages from Tuesday morning onward, said Erica Erland, a spokeswoman for Clark Public Utilities. Several dozen of those outages carried on into the weekend near the Vancouver mall.
“A lot of folks were out of power for longer than usual,” Erland said. “It’s rare for people to have an extended outage, but we had people who were out of power for a couple days even.”
The tally includes 139 small outages, affecting fewer than 10 customers each. Yacolt, Amboy and other parts of north county were hit the hardest, with several trees falling on single power lines in a number of areas, she said.
“Some of the issues we’re seeing are just time-consuming repairs,” Erland said. “You want to take care of that person who’s got a tree in their lawn that’s been waiting for a couple days.”
Downtown Vancouver suffered the largest single outage when a tree fell on a high voltage transmission line and took out all five of the area’s substations, leaving 10,636 customers without power, she said.
As the winds died down Wednesday and Thursday, 20 crews fanned out through the county to clear fallen trees and restore power, Erland said. A crew from the Cowlitz County Public Utility District came south to assist.
“And our employees worked 40 hours straight before they got a couple hours of sleep,” Erland said. “But they’re very good at what they do.”
The storm was unusual for the scale of the damage it caused, but estimates for the cost of the damage were not yet available, Erland said Friday afternoon.
Crews worked hard over the last year to prune hazardous trees near power lines, she said, but the preparation was no match for such strong winds.
“We maintain a very reliable system and are proactive year-round to manage trees and keep lines clear, but it has been a long time since we’ve seen so many very large trees down in the county,” Erland said, “not just in the rural areas but in urban, densely populated areas as well.”
