Friday night’s outage map from Seattle City Light
An underground fire and more issues with the grid around Capitol Hill Station knocked out power to at least 450 customers around Broadway and John Friday night.
“Crews are responding to an energy response underway for a vault fire in the 100 block of Harvard Ave. E. Please avoid the area,” Seattle Fire reported about its “energy response” as the incident unfolded around 6:30 PM.
Remember to treat flashing intersections as four-way stops.
Friday night’s outage follows a disruption to electricity service in the same area Sunday night. A Seattle City Light spokesperson said that outage was due to “a piece of connection equipment that failed in the underground system” and likely not weather related.
This latest vault fire incident comes in the same location a damaging underground electrical system fire in July that required SFD’s specialized ENERGY 1 unit to snuff it out.
SCL said the July fire was caused by equipment failure and that full restoration of service from the systems utilizing was a complicated endeavor. Reports of internet outages followed in the area and were blamed on the power outage by service providers hours after the incident.
Capitol Hill’s transit-rich core has seen Seattle City Light spend millions over the past two decades on projects to add upgrades including thicker wires and larger utility poles to support infrastructure upgrades needed to power Capitol Hill Station.
The light rail station remained in service through Friday night’s fire.
The estimated time for restoration for customers without power was reported as around 4:30 AM.
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