The outage as of 4:30 PM Wednesday

One thousand Capitol Hill customers spent Wednesday without power as Seattle City Light crews worked to locate the cause of a stubborn outage somewhere under the densely popular blocks just south of E Olive Way.

Power problems in the Pine-Olive Way-Harvard Ave Triangle were first reported just before 8 AM and have continued through the day.

Approaching the ninth hour of the outage, a City Light spokesperson said that crews were still trying to locate an underground system failure and pinpoint the exact point of the problem. A 7:15 PM restoration estimate posted earlier in the day on the City Light outage map continued to be displayed despite the ongoing search.

The area of the outage is home to hundreds of apartments and homes but away from commercial buildings and restaurants. But with many still working remotely under COVID-19 restrictions, Wednesday’s outage also surely disrupted more than a few businesses.

UPDATE 7:00 PM: City Light crews identified the problem and were reported working to make repairs starting around 5:30 PM. The plan was “energizing roughly half of the customers out of power” and then to briefly “deenergize” these customers again before restoring power to everyone. The estimated time for full restoration is around midnight, City Light says.

You can visit seattle.gov/city-light/outages for updates.

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