Update: ‘Underground cable failure’ blamed for early-morning power outage in Arbor Heights/Fauntleroy

| Utilities | West Seattle news

6:24 AM: We’ll be asking Seattle City Light this morning about the hourlong early-morning power outage that affected about 4,700 customers in southwest West Seattle. Our apologies for missing it in real time; looks unofficially like it started sometime after 3 am, and ended by 4:20 am, and it appears to have been in what was the primary area of the windstorm outage last weekend (see the screengrab in this tweet from @kjkjal). Whatever we learn from SCL, we’ll add here.

8:44 AM: Though the power was back relatively quickly, SCL’s Scott Thomsen tells WSB, crews are still working on it: “The first thing they did was to isolate the area where they believe the problem exists and re-route power from other circuits. That put all our customers back in service. The crews are still patrolling the line to find out what caused the outage and make repairs.”

5:16 PM: We checked back with Thomsen to see what the crews had found. He replied: “Crews determined that the outage was caused by an underground cable failure. This underground cable is near the substation and feeds the overhead lines in the area that experienced the outage. The damaged area has been isolated and power continues to be routed into the area from an alternate path until permanent repairs can be made.”

LG January 22, 2015 (7:23 am)

Thank you

BG January 22, 2015 (8:07 am)

Keep us posted, at first I thought it was ground day :)

Trileigh January 22, 2015 (8:13 am)

Yeah, you should apologize for not being awake every single hour of every single day in case something happens! :-)
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Seriously, we understand that you guys need to sleep every once in a while. Thank you SO much for everything you do for us all the time.
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We noticed that the clocks were off-time when we got up this morning. I’ll be interested to hear what the cause was.

cj January 22, 2015 (8:57 am)

We had flash lights going just before the power came back on and we live right next to Lincoln Park. One thing though just a few moments after the power came back on we herd an explosion and wondered if some kind of connected transformer died after the power on surge. Sounded kind of similar to when Ive heard those explode before. We are still getting short brown outs now and then.

D-mom January 22, 2015 (10:12 am)

My son and I were actually awake when it went out at 3:00. The power flashed on and off a couple if times as it was going out.

Iris Hofle Williams January 22, 2015 (11:23 am)

I live on the corner of Cloverdale and Fauntleroy, directly across the street from the lower Lincoln Park parking lot… the explosion came exactly when the power was restored and it sounded close. Though the lights stayed on. A visual inspection revealed nothing additional.