A week after intense flooding hit Lewis County, heavy rain and high winds created power outages for around 16,000 Lewis County residents late Tuesday night and into Wednesday.
The Lewis County Public Utility District (PUD) outage map showed more than 7,700 customers remained without power Wednesday morning.
According to PUD General Manager David Plotz, the PUD had all hands on deck with most staff and work crews operating through the night to get power restored to customers across the county and field reports and concerns from customers.
More outage reports were still rolling in Wednesday morning.
The countywide outages are not the result of a single issue or downed line. Outages were the result of fallen trees and branches across the county. Plotz said early Wednesday morning that crews were actively cutting away trees and other debris from downed lines inside and near right-of-ways.
“These are entire trees coming down, and we clear everything we possibly can in our right-of-way,” Plotz said. “Sometimes, when you look, these trees are twice the size of the electrical pole and many feet outside the right-of-way.”
Outages were reported across the county with pockets of major outages from east to west.
More than 1,000 buildings were without power in the Elbe area in the northeast part of the county. Another 2,000 or more were without power in the Mossyrock and Onalaska areas near.
Well over 1,000 homes were also out of power between Packwood and Morton.
More than 600 were also still without power in the westernmost parts of the county near Pe Ell and south of Rochester and Grand Mound, which both sit just north of the county line in Thurston County.
Outages in the most populated area of the county in and around Centralia and Chehalis were as of Wednesday morning much smaller than the more remote parts of the county. Just over 200 power customers in and around Chehalis and toward Adna were still without power at the time and close to 50 on the outskirts of Centralia still had no power.
All regional power estimates are made according to the Lewis County PUD active outage map, which is available to the public on the Lewis County PUD website.
Timelines for restoring power to homes throughout the county depended on the location of the outage, with multiple down or compromised lines creating problems for different residents.
Lewis County PUD customers can call the local utility with questions or to report outages that are not on the PUD’s outage map at any time. Customers can call the Chehalis branch at 360-748-9261 or the Morton branch at 360-496-6100. To view the Lewis County PUD outage map, visit https://tinyurl.com/54pkjket.
