PSE now says the outage was an “unusual failure,” but it was not caused by a car hitting a power pole near Sedro-Woolley.
Steve Reynolds, the CEO of Puget Sound Energy, told the Skagit Valley Herald “We were doing a lot of work and that’s basically what caused the outage.” He added, “We thought we would have no operating problems. It turned out we were wrong.”
The power outage include not only Skagit County, but also San Juan County, much of Island County and parts of Whatcom County.
PSE said they had three maintenance projects under way when the outage occurred on April 23, including maintenance on one of two transformers and two 115 kilovolt transmission lines.
PSE said that with those maintenance projects under way, the rest of the system simply couldn’t handle the unusual, fluctuating power that afternoon. One spike shut down a transformer in Sedro-Woolley an hour before the outage. Then, at 5:30 that evening, with three 115 kv lines and two 230 kv transformers offline, substations felt the power load decrease and automatically shut down systems.
PSE said the electrical systems performed as they were designed to by shutting down to protect the electric grid and homes in the area.