Before the heat wave arrived, we got some questions from former residents of frequently overheated cities, wondering what Seattle City Light was doing to try to hold off brownouts/blackouts once the power demand surged. We haven’t historically had much heat-related trouble here; SCL explained its preparations in this post. That said, the utility is currently dealing with 22 scattered outages affecting 2,600+ customers around its service area. In West Seattle, the most notable outage involved more than two dozen customers at Westwood Village, in an outage that started Friday evening and wasn’t fully resolved until Saturday night (WSB coverage here). Some stores closed. We followed up today with SCL spokesperson Julie Moore, who told us this was one of several weekend outages around the system caused by heat-related underground equipment failure. As for why it took so long to fix, she said that underground outages pose challenges in finding exactly what failed and why, and then they have to be careful with the crews going into the vaults to fix the problem – dealing with temperatures higher than the air outside.