Seems like half the fire department is out here. Smokey smell. pic.twitter.com/tHRHAyfk4V
— matt mitgang (@mmitgang) June 6, 2018
A reported transformer explosion and electrical vault fire near Harvard and E Olive St. left a few rattled nerves and some smoke in the air but only Seattle Central’s main building lost power in an incident that began around 4 PM Wednesday.
Several Seattle Fire units arrived to make sure the scene was secure and no fire or live wires were threatening buildings from the City Light vault or nearby power poles.
transformer explosion 10m ago was underground at olive & harvard. you can actually hear it burning and sparking if you get near the grate
— Jack C (@enth) June 6, 2018
City Light crews were called out to sort out the situation and try to restore power to the college.
There were no reported injuries.
UPDATE 6/7/18 1:15 AM: Outages around the incident spread overnight with approximately 1,200 customers without power according to City Light. The department says equipment failure is to blame for the initial incident. Service is estimated to be restored by around 7 AM.
UPDATE 6/7/18 8:25 AM: Seattle Central will be closed Thursday “due to an ongoing power outage.” The Capitol Hill campus’s daytime and evening classes are canceled.
Seattle City Light, meanwhile, tells CHS that crews were working to restore service Thursday morning and were expecting repairs to be finished before 11 AM.
“They are fixing damage to underground power lines that were damaged in a vault fire,” a City Light spokesperson said. “We don’t know the originating cause of that fire yet.”
City Light confirms that the secondary outage around 1 AM happened so that crews could complete some of the repair work safely by turning off some equipment in the area. That larger outage of around 1,000 customers had been restored though SCC remained dark as of 8:30 AM.
