How we restore power
Puget Sound Energy (PSE) is committed to providing safe, reliable electric service to our customers. We have crews, procedures and materials ready to respond to outages, make repairs and restore power.
At the first sign of trouble
In the beginning of a potentially widespread outage, PSE monitors the weather and assembles staff and equipment to dispatch to potentially affected areas.
During the outage
We continuously monitor the electrical system throughout our service area. During an outage, we send staff to the impacted locations, ready to respond as soon as it is safe to do so. Assessment crews travel through the affected areas reporting damage back to our service dispatchers and we gather data from customers who call in outage reports. We then dispatch crews to repair key equipment.
Emergency response
Of course a top priority is restoring electricity to our community's first responders—fire, police and hospitals—that are needed to assist others in emergency situations. In addition, some temporary repairs will be made during a large outage situation, in order to reach and restore as many customers as quickly as possible.
After an outage
Even after the weather has changed and the power has been restored to many customers, some isolated locations or temporary repairs will still require our crews' attention. We stay on duty until every customer has their electricity safely restored and then continue to work to make permanent repairs.
Download this PDF illustration
This graphic illustrates important points in the power restoration process.
How Power Gets Restored (201 KB PDF)
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