PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Two days after a significant storm knocked out power to almost 200,000 homes and businesses in Oregon and Southwest Washington, crews have made progress getting service restored, but there is still a long way to go.
Portland General Electric told KOIN 6 News Thursday they’ve called in mutual aid from other states and have 550 employees working to restore power to customers as quickly as possible.
They call it an “all hands on deck situation.”
“There are some customers who won’t be restored until this weekend,” said Andrea Platt from PGE. “We’re down to the last repairs. The challenging news is these are individual repairs… Each repair will only bring a small number of people back to service, which means it will take more time to have impact, unfortunately.”
Many people without power live in remote areas with hills and a lot of trees. Platt said those areas are harder for crews to access.
PGE first prioritized getting power on for critical infrastructure and first responders. That’s also how the city is prioritizing removing downed trees.
Here’s where things stand as of 4:30 p.m. Thursday:
There are still more than 4,000 PGE customers without service. That is down from more than 112,000 late Tuesday. The bulk of PGE’s issues continues to be along the Interstate 5 corridor with additional large service interruptions in Washington County and the Molalla area.
PGE is reporting outages from Grand Ronde east to Government Camp and Sauvie Island south to Sunnyside.
More than 1,200 Pacific Power customers are still waiting for service to be restored. Most of those are in the Cave Junction and Medford areas, with another big group near Astoria and between Salem and Corvallis. Pacific Power is reporting a handful of outages in the Portland-metro area.
In Southwest Washington, Clark County PUD finished restoring power to all customers Thursday. At the height of the outages, more than 20,000 customers were without power.
Tillamook People’s Utility District:
On the Oregon Coast, Tillamook People’s Utility District is still dealing with more than 60 outages from Tuesday’s storm. The bulk of those is along Highway 101 near Tillamook and in neighborhoods near Nehalem and Manzanita.
This is a Developing Story and will be updated throughout the day.