Friday night’s outage map from Seattle City Light
An underground fire and more issues with the grid around Capitol Hill Station knocked out power to at least 450 customers around Broadway and John Friday night.
“Crews are responding to an energy response underway for a vault fire in the 100 block of Harvard Ave. E. Please avoid the area,” Seattle Fire reported about its “energy response” as the incident unfolded around 6:30 PM.
Remember to treat flashing intersections as four-way stops.
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Friday night’s outage follows a disruption to electricity service in the same area Sunday night. A Seattle City Light spokesperson said that outage was due to “a piece of connection equipment that failed in the underground system” and likely not weather related.
This latest vault fire incident comes in the same location a damaging underground electrical system fire in July that required SFD’s specialized ENERGY 1 unit to snuff it out.
SCL said the July fire was caused by equipment failure and that full restoration of service from the systems utilizing was a complicated endeavor. Reports of internet outages followed in the area and were blamed on the power outage by service providers hours after the incident.
Capitol Hill’s transit-rich core has seen Seattle City Light spend millions over the past two decades on projects to add upgrades including thicker wires and larger utility poles to support infrastructure upgrades needed to power Capitol Hill Station.
The light rail station remained in service through Friday night’s fire.
The estimated time for restoration for customers without power was reported as around 4:30 AM.
Who is running this circus of a power agency
No one it’s called above-ground lines and it ain’t ever going away unless you want Sales taxes up to 12%
Replacing above-ground lines with under-ground lines can definitely reduce the number of power outages that occur. Its a worthwhile investment to make. That being said, paying for it will be a challenge, as it is not cheap. Sales taxes are one way to do it, but it could also be done through property tax lids. Thats how Ocean Shores was able to pay for many of their power lines to be buried back in the 2010/2011 timeframe.
Did you not catch the part where this was an underground electrical issue?
After each fire the odds of another fire keeps going up. Buried services are harder to upgrade and won’t benefit from a number of the innovations being put to work like active cooling of lines.
Did the person who responded to the post realize that it was an underground issue? Of course not, they just care about their idealized outcome.
Could there be any connection to this?
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-city-light-probe-reveals-party-truck-culture-underground-network-crew/FMWNQ6RSXVEELO36RQ262XVN3U/
I would hope not. I hope that, since KIRO reported this story, the city has taken action to end this party truck culture.
That doesn’t magically fix the likely shoddy work that was done for years by this group that was constantly drinking on the job…
No, but it would potentially prevent any more shoddy work from being done by them. Any work they did do needs to be inspected by a third party (to try and prevent the city from being able to cover up any shoddy work that was done), and any work that is found to be shoddy must be redone.
What’s orange and sleeps 4? ;-)
“Remember to treat flashing intersections as four-way stops.”
Dark ones, too. Saw lots of cars blowing through Broadway/John and Broadway/Thomas without the slightest caution during the outage.