No easy road: Keeping the lights on in rural WA

Published 1:30 am Monday, April 13, 2026

When people think about their electric service, they usually think about it the moment it stops working.

A storm rolls in off the coast, the lights go out, and the clock starts. What most customers don’t see is what happens next — and how much work goes into reaching some of the furthest corners of our service territory.

Our service area doesn’t follow the grid of a city. It follows rivers, logging roads, hillsides, and the curve of the Pacific Ocean shoreline. When a line goes down near a rural home or farm, or in the middle of forest land, our crews may be looking at a long drive on a road that may not even be paved or blocked by trees or slides — and that’s before the work even begins.

Add rain, wind, mud, and darkness, and you begin to understand why rural restoration can take longer than a comparable outage in Aberdeen or Hoquiam.

Something that doesn’t get talked about much is the challenge of working along our two-lane highways. Grays Harbor County has plenty of them, and when a line goes down along one of those roads, our crews face a problem that city utilities simply don’t encounter — finding a safe place to pull a large line truck off the road. On a narrow two-lane highway with no shoulder and limited visibility, that can mean driving until the crew finds a location where they can safely work before any repair can begin. It’s a detail that adds real time and complexity to what might otherwise look like a straightforward job.

What impresses me most is that our crews take it in stride. They know this territory. Many of them grew up here. When they head out at 2 a.m. in November to restore power to a handful of homes at the end of a gravel road, they’re not just doing a job — they’re looking after their neighbors.

Our rural customers sometimes wonder if they’re an afterthought. They are not. Every customer on our system matters equally, whether they’re in a subdivision or at the end of a five-mile easement. Our crews operate that way, and as your commissioner, I’m proud to represent a utility that does too.