Power back on after overnight outage

Geeky Swedes Ballard

Power is back on this morning for Ballard residents after an outage overnight. According to comments in the forum, the power went out just after midnight and came back on about an hour later. fubar drove around the area and adds this in comments, “Power was off across a wide area from about 12:10 am to about 1:15 am. I went out and drove around and it appeared to be an area from Market street north to 67th (Market Street and 65th had power but only those streets). Outage appeared to go from the RR tracks all the way east to 15th, with a couple of isolated streets (24th) and areas (a few blocks east of 24th between Market St. and 65th).”
Update: Seattle City Light says, “This AM’s power outage in Ballard/Fremont caused by animal short circuiting a major buss at the Canal Substation. Power restored in 2 hrs.”

Geeky Swedes

The founders of My Ballard

45 thoughts to “Power back on after overnight outage”

  2. Power was off across a wide area from about 12:10 am to about 1:15 am. I went out and drove around and it appeared to be an area from Market street north to 67th (Market Street and 65th had power but only those streets). Outage appeared to go from the RR tracks all the way east to 15th, with a couple of isolated streets (24th) and areas (a few blocks east of 24th between Market St. and 65th).

    KOMO radio kept saying the outage was in *Fremont* and said that 12,000 City Light customers were effected. They said City Light wasn't sure what had happened and had no ETA for a fix.

    When the power went off, I heard a loud BANG! somewhere around 28th and 60th.

    Glad they got it back up in little more than an hour…I was contemplating having to toss the contents of my fridge and wondering of my cell phone alarm would really wake me in time to get to work.

    Time to snooze, now that the juice is flowing again.

  3. I'm in Phinney, and ours went out briefly about 1:45 (I was awakened by the house “coming back to life.” Due to the big surge when our neighbors in Ballard were re-energized, I suspect.

  5. We live near the sub-station on 8th and 45th. Around 10pm, I heard a boom. There was another boom around midnight, and then we lost power until close to 1:30am. Still re-setting the clocks this morning…

  7. Does anyone know if the neighborhood schools will be closed if they don't have power restored by 9-ish? Our power is back on, but when I look east or north, it looks pretty darn dark everywhere.

  9. Were without power at 24th and 65th for atleast an hour. Also, I've been noticing flickers over the past few weeks where all the light just blink off and then back on. I thought it was my imagination.

  13. I think they're swamped due to lack of staff, but I want to talk to a newspaperman I know & ask. I think in the old days, this would have made the afternoon paper, so I may be unreasonable in wanting to see something this morning.

  14. We also heard a bang of some kind here near 6th & market.

    I was amazed at how unprepared City Light is to handle a high volume of calls in a situation like this.

    They have a main line you can call that's supposed to have an automated listing of known problems so you don't bug them about an outage they already know about, but 30+ miutes into the outage it still hadn't been updated. And of course we couldn't get through on the actual reporting line to see if they even knew about the problem….

  15. When parts of QA were out several weeks ago, THEY made the news! I'm surprised there's been no mention of it on the radio this morning, either. It was freakishly silent, although I could see lights on the other side of the canal, and the north part of Phinney ridge.

    Since we've only lost power a few times over several years (and even then, it pops back on quickly) I'm surprised that the press doesn't seem to care. If nothing else, the hospital losing power should have been important enough to mention. I realize the emergency generators kicked on, but that's a rare happening at the Ballard campus.

  17. I can tell you that the power outage definitely came over to 3rd NW in the above-65th category. We all got up this morning marveling over how nice and bright it was thanks to the return to Standard Time and were getting ready in a leisurely fashion until we glanced at the lone battery-powered clock and got quite a startle, scurried to check times on cell phones and computers to confirm it, and then said “whoops! Hurry!” as we realized it was 7:30 and not just before 6 a.m….

  18. Actually, Seattle City Light contacted us (a business on the Missing Link) Friday to let us know they were going to shut off the power sometime Sunday. I assume they were trying to fix or test something.

  21. Weren't the QA outages 'planned outages?' I could be wrong about that. But a planned outage would be newsworthy if only to let people know and prepare for it.
    Seems like the big boys are letting these little neighborhood blogs do a lot of their work, though.

  22. Once again, There's no mention of this power outage on the Seattle City Light website. or thier blog “power lines”. or thier “twitter”. When is Seattle City Light going to learn to communicate with the people? How hard would it be to just post EVERY press release they send out on their website?? Seattle City Light is struggling with an old infrastructure and even older view of how to manage their community relations.

  23. The QA 'planned outage' was on both the blog and the big paper site (think it was the Times). If this was also planned, I'm a little surprised and upset nobody knew.
    What are we, chopped liver!?

  27. Add some credibility to your statement and tell us what business you represent. Considering no one else is backing this up I'm doubtful of your truthfulness.

  28. I didn't hear a bang so never woke up. If my power went out it was back by the time I got up and about. Plus my alarm clock is plugged in with a battery back-up, so I would never had known there was a power outage if not for this. I've got leftovers in the fridge I'm throwing out 'just in case' but it would have been nice to have an official word before I ate something I would regret later.

  29. What was so frustrating about this is that when I did call the emergency line at Seattle City Light to get the update, the information message was full of “Um's, ah's” and finally when they finally got to the outage information the zone was listed from “the Puget Sound to the west, Aurora Avenue to the East, 85th to the North and the Ship Canal to the South. Approximately 12,000 customers were impacted with no cause or ETA of repair.” So if it was a “planned” outage, why would they not know the cause? While I try not to be too critical of emergency personelle as I know it's stressful, seriously, I write a script for my personal voicemail, and that's just heard by my friends and family calling, I would think that someone recordning a message to be heard by the public would at least have some of the details a little closer at hand. Just my 2 cents.

    The other thing that I found strange was simultaneously as the power went out my AT&T phone went into SOS mode which made me think that something serious was happening, (note my T-Mobile device had no such problem).

    Even the fire station on Market looked dark, but that may have been just that they were hopefully sleeping.

  30. For some odd reason all of our hard wired smoke alarms went off at 12:20 AM so we woke up to a complete panic in the dark.

    Power came back at roughly 1:15 AM.

    We're at 6th and 54th so south of Market.

    After disabling the smoke alarms I took a look out of our westward facing windows and everything was dark from the ship canal to as far north as I could see, and from our place all the way west to 15th Ave.

    There was also a power outage in Fremont, the business I work at is near where 36th becomes Leary Way, and the power was out here from shortly after midnight until at least 2:30 AM.

    Pretty major power outage if it's affecting multiple locations over a mile apart…

  32. I'm on 65th and 32nd…heard a big bang, and then…darkness. (however, I had dozens of candles from Halloween out, so no problemo.Rather charming effect, actually, but made reading difficult. Let's all say a heartfelt thank-you to Thomas Edison right now.) I went for a little drive and observed: Power out from 67th south…street lights out up to about 26th. Parts of 24th south of 65th had power, and other parts did not. Since I was up and had the TV, computer, and dishwasher going, I waited until the power came back on to go to bed. Nothing says “heart attack” more than going to bed and having all the lights and TV you forgot to turn off roar back to life.

  33. for those of us that were up, it was really a beautiful moment on a fairly clear night w/a full moon. no street lights, no car lights and peaceful. seattle doesn't get that too often and on the west side of ballard, it rarely happens. all was calm, all was bright…..oops! sorry, wrong holiday.

  34. We live at 74th and 1st nw – and also awoke to hard wired smoke alarms beeping when the power went out. I think 1st was the cut off because up the block power was on.

  35. City Light Twitter finally updated: “This AM's power outage in Ballard/Fremont caused by animal short circuiting a major buss at the Canal Substation. Power restored in 2 hrs.”

  37. My power went off just for a split second at around midnight, then came back on and I immediately heard a loud boom (sound probably took some time to travel to me at 53rd and 11th in Ballard).

    My guess is that the boom indicates some sort of 'unplanned outage.'

  43. Slept through it all. The clocks were blinking 2:12, they reset at 12:00 so the power came on at least 2 hours before I noticed. Sorry I missed it.

Leave a Reply