Whipping winds reaching up to 75 mph breezed through Western Washington, leaving 19,000 Jefferson County residents without power for extended periods of time over the weekend.

Some homes and businesses were still without power Monday morning as the Jefferson County Public Utility District continued its efforts to clear out trees, branches, and other weather-related hazards to reset power lines.

As of Monday afternoon, 1,430 PUD customers remained in the dark, with the majority on Marrowstone Island, in the Port Hadlock area, and parts of Port Townsend.

“In terms of sheer numbers, this is a very big event, because of the strange direction of the wind,” said Jameson Hawn, digital communications specialist with the PUD.

Beyond Jefferson County, more than 300,000 customers across Western Washington lost electricity as the first major storm of the rainy season gusted through the region.

Due to the heavy winds flowing from the northwest, atypically, the damage was outside the bounds of the usual damage seen after a fall storm.

“We’re used to storms hitting from the south, around Hood Canal,” Hawn said. “The wind coming from northwest, coming across, that’s why Snohomish [County] was hit really bad.”

Around 93 percent of residents throughout Jefferson County were without power, according to the utility district.

The PUD was quick to action when the outages first occurred Friday night, with line workers and staff members working in shifts to reset power lines, remove storm debris, and reconnect the power grid.

Hawn noted that residents need to stay at least 50 or more feet away from any downed lines for their own safety, and to not touch the lines or any branches or other objects near to or contacting the downed line.

“Marrowstone is a big focus today, and then we also have some smaller ones at Cook Avenue, so we have good number of folks without power there,” Hawn said of the utility district’s prioritized efforts on Monday.

The other big focus is reestablishing the transmission line that feeds into the Port Townsend Paper Mill.

“All transmission lines are up except for the one feeding to the mill, and the mill is being fed from a different direction,” Hawn said.

It hasn’t been a one-organization show either, as the PUD has received line-crew assistance from Mason Public Utility District 1, Palouse Power, and the Olympic Electric Company. Meanwhile, the local utility authority’s four-journeyman and two-apprentice team has been hard at work since Friday.

The outcome from the heavy winds was also a major headache for drivers throughout the Quimper Peninsula over the weekend, with multiple major roadways, including Highway 20, being closed down for long periods of time as line crews cleared out tree branches and storm debris lining the roads.   

“We had our county roads representative to work alongside the PUD, and they had to coordinate quickly,” said Willie Bence, director of the Jefferson County Department of Emergency Management. “We’ve been helping to put together meetings to keep our partners informed.”

While estimates for the sheer cost of the weather event have yet to be calculated, there’s likely much more to uncover.

“We haven’t started having conversations with the PUD on costs yet … with [power] restoration still ongoing, that number keeps ticking up,” Bence said.

“With these systems being so complex and interconnected, we won’t know the full scale of damages until we’re back fully and can crunch the numbers,” Bence added.

Regardless, Bence was quick to acknowledge the utility district’s nonstop efforts to restore electricity to customers around the county, as well as the support from neighboring utility companies and organizations that were helping alongside. 

“It’s just excellent. I can’t speak enough to the partnership between the PUD, county public works, city [of Port Townsend] public works,” Bence said. “The partnerships have been great, and really, the PUD has taken the brunt of it, doing phenomenal work.”

On East Jefferson Fire Rescue’s side, the department has dealt with power issues of its own as they respond to emergency calls.

“We still don’t have power at a few stations,” East Jefferson Fire Rescue Chief Bret Black said.

“It’s a little longer than we’d like and not all of our niceties at the stations are powered by the generator, but we have the radios and we have the essentials so that firefighters can live there safely during the power outage,” he said.

Dealing with the obstacles brought by the wild winds, firefighters split into four quadrants across Fire Districts 1 and 3 in case any key roadways were closed off while a crew was responding to a call.

“Friday night was really the crescendo if you will. We split the county into quadrants so that all of us wouldn’t get cut off in one geographic corner of the district,” Black said.

“Nobody got any sleep that night.”