A powerful windstorm blew into the region Saturday, downing trees throughout the island and knocking out power to thousands on Vashon and Maury.
About 1,000 Vashon customers lost power overnight on Saturday, according to Akiko Oda, a spokeswoman for Puget Sound Energy (PSE). About 800 were still without power at noon on Sunday. Then an additional 2,000 lost power on Sunday evening due to falling tree limbs, but PSE had that outage restored in about an hour, Oda said.
As of Monday morning, PSE was still working to restore power to four homes on Vashon and expected to finish those repairs by noon.
High winds blew about 30 trees onto island roads, according to Jim Didricksen, a King County Roads supervisor based on Vashon. Vashon’s eight-person road crew worked all day Sunday to clear roadways, and was still working on Monday to open up Cedarhurst Road and Dockton Road between 248th Street and 260th Street.
Many of the downed trees took out power lines, but none did significant damage, Didricksen said. He expected crews would have all roads open by Monday evening, but said it would take a couple weeks to clear debris.
“There’s still a considerable amount of mess to clear,” he said.
Saturday’s windstorm also blew over Voice of Vashon’s new FM antenna atop the Water District 19 tower. Rick Wallace of VoV said volunteers put the mast back up with a temporary fix on Sunday, and the antenna, which is at the top of the mast, was not damaged. The new FM station, KVSH, could have a weaker signal until the group finds a permanent fix for the mast.
“We’re still studying what actually went wrong. It’s not completely clear,” he said.