Seattle’s December Wind Storm
Last week, Seattle suffered a wind storm. This storm was as strong as one we had in 1993. Winds were clocked at 69 mph (111 kph) at the airport, but on the coast, winds were clocked at much higher speeds. So far, this storm has killed 10+ people. In total, about 1.5 million households lost power in western Washington. Puget Sound Energy, our utility company, had 700,000 customers without power.
My house lost power on Thursday, 12/14, at around 9 pm. The power wasn’t restored until around 2:00 am on 12/19. Since we didn’t have any electricity at the house, we did not have any heat. My roommate and I used our wood stove as our primary source of heat for those days we were left in the dark. Once the fire died while we were sleeping, our house would have an internal temperature of 38°F (3.3°C). Bottom line, we froze our asses off!
Reports stated that the city of Bellevue suffered about 80% power loss. The neighborhood we live in suffered some damage. Most of the roads in and out of the neighborhood were closed because of fallen trees. Only about 1 block away from our house, we found 3 trees that were blown over. One of those trees was about 100 feet tall and that was the one that knocked out our power. Puget Sound Energy had to replace around 5 power poles in our neighborhood. Our neighbor directly across the street had a tree limb pierce his roof. The grocery store near our house was sold out of most items. The two gas stations that had power near us were selling out of fuel daily.
During the power outage, Jay and I would were obviously bored. We didn’t have our video games or TV to occupy our time. We didn’t have any internet connection or home telephone service. Sometimes, our cell phones wouldn’t work because the cell towers also suffered power outages. Our time was basically spent sitting in front of the fire trying to thaw out, playing with the dogs, and singing stupid little jingles we made up while drinking ice cold beer. Since it was so dang cold outside, we would just leave the beer on the porch and that kept it nice and cold for us. Saturday, Breann and Michelle came over and spent the night with us so we weren’t totally alone. By Tuesday evening, I was going crazy! I was tired of being cold and tired of being without power. A few streets in our neighborhood didn’t loose power. My mom was one of those fortunate few. So Tuesday night I decided enough was enough. I stayed at my mom’s place and Jay stayed over at his buddy’s house.
As of today, we do have power and heat at our house. Since we are on satellite TV, we also have access to all our cable television channels. Our internet service is still down, and since we are on Comcast’s Digit Voice (VoIP), our home telephone service is also down. We are supposed to have a much smaller wind storm tonight, but since a lot of trees were weakened by the last storm, there is a good chance that we might loose power again.
We took some pictures on Jay’s digital camera. Once I download those photos to my laptop, I will upload the photos to my photo gallery. The pictures we took show the damage that was suffered in our neighborhood and also some pictures of what we did during the power outage.
