PORT TOWNSEND — Wind gusts up to 50 miles per hour blew down lines in East Jefferson County on Sunday, leaving more than 2,900 electrical utility customers without power.
The majority of outages were in Port Townsend and in Discovery Bay from Gardiner to Lake Leland, said Will O’Donnell, Jefferson Public Utility District spokesperson.
At 3:45 p.m., Jefferson County Public Utility District crews were working to take care of lines that had gone down near Jefferson Healthcare hospital in Port Townsend and to get electrical power back up in the city, O’Donnell said.
At that time, a total of 2,949 customers were listed on the PUD website, at https://www.jeffpud.org/outage-info, as having lost power in East Jefferson County.
O’Donnell expected Port Townsend to be back up in a couple of hours but added that all of outages probably wouldn’t be fixed until late Sunday night.
“The winds are blowing strong,” he said.
The National Weather Service had a gale warning in effect until 6 p.m. Sunday for Admiralty Inlet.
Gusts of 39 mph were measured at a monitoring site near Port Townsend and of 47 mph at a site south of Port Townsend, said Carly Kovacik, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Seattle.
“There probably were sites with gusts of up to 50 mph, she said Sunday.
The strongest winds in the region on Sunday were in Bellingham, where a gust of 64 mph was measured, Kovacik said. Heavy gusts also were seen in Grays Harbor, she added.
The storm system was coming out of the Pacific and traveling north.
