Days of Soaking Rains & A Big Wind Storm = Power Outage

I haven’t been online for a day and a half due to a power outage. At one point, more than 300,000 people in the Seattle area lost power. So… I have plenty to do when such an event hits, but Cat was thrown off her game and had to take a day off work because she had no way to do it without power. (Her work requires 3 screens, so she can’t just take a laptop and go to a place with WiFi.)

We’ve had DAYS of soaking rain, and Sunday and Monday this week it was just POURING and dark all day long. Then the rains cleared out, but by winds that gusted into the 50s! That combination with our giant trees is… well… problematic.

I knew the pressure was shifting because my whole body felt off– but weather forecasts said it wouldn’t be that big of a thing, just some mild winds 15 to 20 miles per hour. Then just before midnight, I heard a long crashing WHOOSH in the trees around our house followed by bang, thwack, thunk, whack as limbs and fir cones came falling off the Douglas firs and onto our roof and all over the yards. Within 5 minutes there were explosions and blue-green light flashing outside as wires got knocked down and transformers blew, all over the place!

And we were plunged into darkness. I turned a couple of battery powered nightlights on and crawled back into bed, though I kept waking every time a new gust of wind sent things crashing to the ground (or roof). It’s a MESS out there. (I cleaned some of it yesterday and today– still a lot to do…) By morning, the wind was only a breeze, but electric was still off- and stayed off until 4 am this morning.

Cat and I did do a drive to use her car to power up her phone (and get out for a bit) and there was water coming down off every small hill everywhere we went. We heard that a “Landslide Warning” was issued in our area, which doesn’t happen very often. Places where people cut down trees for a view were the worst hit. No trees to soak up that water meant a lot of slides. We don’t have really high hills where we are, just smaller ones, so it wasn’t too bad, but it’s clear the ground is completely saturated.

Most of Cat’s friends who weren’t on a hill (and worrying about sliding off it) had flooded basements. Not us, though–! Cat had our crawlspace sealed from pests and water so we don’t have that headache. In the Pacific Northwest, this level of water is not normal– but it happens often enough that preparing for it if you can afford to is prudent.

But I’m back! And all is well. We had no real damage, just a big mess to clean up.