This weekend’s storm action has begun.
Amazingly, our house made it through last night’s windstorm action without losing power for more than a couple of minutes at a time. We did have several tiny power hits, and we’re continuing to have them this morning, but so far our power is holding. And every time I see our power flicker, I go into Han Solo mode.
Hold Together!
Not so much for a lot of other local folks; as of this writing, over 11,000 people are showing as out on the PSE Outage Map. This number has been fluctuating mightily over the last couple of hours, but it’s not dropped below 6,000 as of when I got up.
Reports have been that the morning commute has been wretched as well. There has been water on the roadways, a lot of collisions, and for a little while even, the SB express lanes on I-5 were shut down. Between that and the word that Hillary Clinton is here for a private fundraising event downtown, which has the potential to pooch the evening commute up RIGHT good, I NOPED right out of trying to commute today and am currently trying to work from home.
GET OFF THE ROAD
Local news reports have downgraded expectations for tomorrow’s storm from “comparable to the Columbus Day storm in 1962” to “comparable to the storm we had in December 2006”. KOMO’s report on that is here. And Cliff Mass put up a post yesterday with an updated forecast here.
From what these reports were saying, we had conflicting models in play as to where the remnants of Typhoon Songda were going to hit. And now these models appear to have split the difference, which means we’re going to have a mess on our hands tomorrow. Not as severe a mess as earlier worries indicated, but still a mess.
I was here for the 2006 storm and that’s the one that had a lot of local people without power for 9-10 days, even on our hill. We were only down for about two and a half days but that’s still a lot. Here are my LJ posts from that month:
Hardcore power flickers at the Murkworks
Electricity, it’s good to have you back!
So yeah. That storm was a mess. And if tomorrow’s action is going to be similar, we’re in for some fun times. It’s supposed to get windier later today, too, and it’s windy in Kenmore right now.
Let’s see how long we stay up and if I manage to get today’s dayjob tasks done. Place your bets!
And everybody stay safe and dry out there!
Editing to add: Holy crap, Seattle City Light’s got nearly 20,000 out right now. Puget Sound Energy’s got over 16,000. And this is the warmup act for tomorrow. There are outages just north of the Big Fish office, too, so this will be me being a little happy I NOPED right out of trying to commute. Coworkers on our Slack system are reporting flickering lights in the office.
