Capitol Hill blackout Seattle skyline, originally uploaded by coreygo.
An early morning power outage has left residents and businesses in parts of Capitol Hill, First Hill and the Central District without electricity this morning. Around 1:20 AM, the first ripple of Tweets rolled across Twitter citing locations from Pike/Pine above Broadway to I-5 as being without power.
UPDATE (12/21 5:14 am): Seattle City Light reports that 99% of First Hill and Capitol Hill residents have their power back. It estimates that 29 customers are still without electricity. The cause of the outage remains unknown.
Update update: City Light says that power is back for the last 29 customers and are now blaming “a problem related to a cable” for the outage.
UPDATE:
Seattle City Light says that 2,900 customers are without service in an area between John and E. Columbia and Yale and E. 21st. See the map below.
The cause has not yet been determined and there is no estimate yet on when service will be restored. The area affected includes much of the Hill’s nightlife core. Sunday night patrons were sent out onto a dark and rainy Hill. Fortunately, the 911 logs have been quiet thus far.
The last outage of this scale on the Hill was in August when more than 3,000 were without power after tree branches fell on wires near St. Mark’s. That outage lasted about six hours.
UPDATE:
Here’s a good number to have in your contacts. City Light 24-hour outage hotline: (206) 684-7400. The department’s blog also now has an entry up about the outage with the same info from the hotline — though the post says the outage was first noticed around midnight. Think that might be a typo.
Also, Brad chimes in from Broadway/Union where the lights are out, too.
View 12/21 Cap Hill Power Outage in a larger map
Some of the Twitter chatter from the morning (in reverse chronological order):
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paperwalrus: Power out at Cha Cha. Pitch black downstairs!SEATTLE -
MacGoogly: Weird, my power going off woke me up out of a dream. Shouldn’t I sleep better when all the noises like my fridge stop?SEATTLE -
FireRabbit: Uh just lost power and some sort of alarm is going off in bldg. Not sure WTF is going on, as I sit here and tweet in the dark.SEATTLE
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j_vallentine: Aaahhhhhhhhhhh the power just went out!Seattle, WA, USA -
chelseamitchell: Power outage on the hill?Seattle, WA -
echoratt: Weird. All of my power just turned offSEATTLE
Also lost Comcast TV and internet this morning. It came back on around 9:15am. Then my modem rebooted on its own around 9:35am.
All cool with Quest DSL – no interuption