UPDATED 9 a.m. Jan. 12
All power has been restored to the Port Ludlow area as of this morning. Anyone without power should call Jefferson County Public Utility District at 360-385-5800. The PUD …
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RaeLynn Whiteside, a para-educator at Chimacum Middle School, pours a hot cocoa for herself as she waits to serve those affected by the Port Ludlow power outage at the school's officially designated warming station Jan. 11.
Photo by Kirk Boxleitner
UPDATED 9 a.m. Jan. 12
All power has been restored to the Port Ludlow area as of this morning. Anyone without power should call Jefferson County Public Utility District at 360-385-5800. The PUD reports that power was restored as 10 p.m. Wednesday.
UPDATED 4:25 p.m. Jan. 11
After a fire at the Port Ludlow substation on Beaver Valley (State Route 19) took out power for more than 2,000 customers Wednesday, Jan. 11, Jefferson County Public Utility District officials believe that regular service could resume as early as 6 p.m. for many households.
Equipment at the substation failed at about 8:30 a.m., disrupting power, said Jim Parker, PUD general manager. Responding crews indicated that needed repairs would take most of the day, he said.
“We think the transformer is OK, but if that's damaged, it'll be another day or two to replace it,” Parker said. “We'd already started the work to co-locate another transformer in the area, or else it would take even longer.”
Parker reported that the Port Ludlow store had its power restored by the early afternoon, but warned that homeowners in the Paradise Bay neighborhood could take longer to reach.
“We shifted a lot of folks onto the Chimacum substation, but of course, then we had to shift a number of folks in Chimacum onto the Irondale substation in turn,” Parker said.
The Chimacum schools had already established a warming station for those affected by the power outage at 1 p.m., and Parker expected others to open if power remained out by the evening.
“It all started when we lost one of the regulators, which took out the whole substation,” Parker said.
After power is restored, Parker expects PUD to examine the voltage regulator, which was only three years old.
“When our regulators fail, they tend to be older,” Parker said. “We don't know what was wrong with this one.”
Although the regulator did catch fire, Parker deemed it a brief culmination of the malfunction.
Check the PUD map online for the latest outage status at:
ebill.jeffpud.org/woViewer/mapviewer.html?config=Outage+Web+Map
