Preparing for Winter Storms
Puget Sound Energy prepares year-round to minimize the impact winter storms or other emergencies may have on its systems, and is investing heavily in technology and efforts to become even more reliable.
How Puget Sound Energy Responds When an Outage Occurs
Puget Sound Energy crews are ready to respond whenever an outage does occur. Newly installed automated meter reading technology and a lot of manpower is used to assess and pinpoint the damage. However, we still depend on your calls to help us identify safety hazards and outages. So, please call us at 1-888-225-5773 to report an emergency or outage.
Every Puget Sound Energy employee has a storm duty and may be called on to respond, day or night. Depending on the severity of the storm, the assessment phase may take time (up to six hours). During that time we may not be able to provide accurate and comprehensive power restoration estimates until we can clearly assess the extent of damage. Nevertheless, a lot of people are working non-stop with the singular aim of restoring power as quickly as is safely possible.
PSE crews almost immediately start clearing downed lines and eliminating other related safety hazards when a storm hits. The first objective is to keep people from getting hurt, and to make sure places like hospitals have power.
The next priority is the high-voltage lines that provide power to thousands of people. Next, distribution lines or equipment that serve individual neighborhoods are restored.
It's dangerous work with high-voltage lines whipping around in the wind, wet and cold, so the work sometimes isn't done as fast as we'd like. But the efforts will continue until power is restored. We appreciate your patience, but want to hear from you again if the wait is long.