High winds and heavy rain knocked out power to thousands of customers in the Westport area Tuesday, but four PUD crews working through the night restored power to most customers by 11 a.m. Wednesday.
Johnny Burg with the National Weather Service in Seattle scanned several weather reporting sources and noted a gust of 47 mph recorded in Westport on Tuesday evening. Looking at Ocean Shores, “the wind was pretty tame” when compared to Westport, with more than an inch and a half of rain in 36 hours between Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.
“Hoquiam Tuesday had 1.44 inches of rainfall and did have a sustained wind of 43 mph,” said Burg, who added a gust of 53 mph was recorded 5:28 p.m. Tuesday, with the sustained 43 mph wind about an hour and a half earlier.
Grays Harbor PUD began reporting outages in the South Beach area around 6 p.m. Tuesday. As of Wednesday morning, more than 5,000 customers were without power in the area from Markham west to Westport and south to Tokeland. The main issue was the loss of eight transmission poles in a marshy area off State Route 105. Because of their location, the high winds, tides and the marshy ground, crews struggled to replace them but reportedly had power restored to most, if not all, affected by the outage by 11 a.m. Wednesday.
Comcast Public Relations Director Walter Neary says the company is monitoring the Westport power outage and is ready to restore services to all areas once the power is restored. He said he was unaware of any damage to Comcast’s infrastructure, but the effects of the storm were still being assessed Wednesday morning.
According to the PUD, there was a smaller outage in Ocean Shores reported Tuesday night on Park Avenue caused by a pole fire. Around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, there was another outage reported in the North Beach area from Copalis Crossing to Iron Springs impacting more than 600 customers.
The National Weather Service says the winds will die down considerably. As of 10 a.m. Wednesday, winds were still in the 30 mph range in Hoquiam but will drop to below 10 mph in the mid-afternoon. While there have been no significant reports of flooding as of Wednesday morning, the area remains under a flood watch until midnight today.
