A cold front that swept across western Washington overnight from November 7 to 8 left tens of thousands of customers in the Puget Sound region without power. By Sunday morning, Seattle City Light expected to restore service to about 20,000 customers, while more than 12,000 remained without electricity in Puget Sound Energy’s service area in King, Kitsap, Pierce and Thurston counties. The wind had already eased, but utility crews still had to clear fallen trees, inspect downed lines and repair damaged sections of the grid.
The storm did not arrive gradually, but in a short, sharp overnight burst. On Saturday, the National Weather Service had warned that a cold front would cross the Seattle area around midnight, bringing heavy rain and southerly winds with gusts of up to 45–50 miles per hour. Gusts of up to 60 miles per hour were forecast along the Pacific coast, and storm conditions were expected on the water, with waves reaching 22 to 28 feet.
For Seattle and its suburbs, the danger on nights like this comes not so much from the rain itself as from the combination of soggy ground, trees that have not yet shed their leaves, and tall trees growing close to overhead power lines. Meteorologists specifically noted that foliage increases wind resistance, so even a relatively brief front can snap branches and bring trees down onto wires. As a result, power does not go out in one large blackout; instead, numerous localized outages have to be located and repaired one by one.
The morning figures showed the scale of the outages, but also the limitations of such counts. They refer to utility customers—homes, apartments and businesses—not to an exact number of people. Seattle City Light serves Seattle proper and some neighboring areas; Puget Sound Energy supplies many suburbs and areas east and south of the city. Beyond the central metro area, the storm front also hit other utilities: Grays Harbor PUD reported more than 9,000 outages, while Snohomish PUD reported about 1,500.
The night was spent not only in darkened homes. Road crews and emergency responders cleared routes of trunks and large branches. In Lewis County, shortly before 10 p.m., a multi-vehicle crash and fallen trees blocked all southbound lanes of I-5 near Highway 12. In Clallam County, trees and branches forced the closure of a section of State Route 113 near US 101. Such closures are a reminder that utility work often begins not at a transformer, but with clearing the road to reach it.
By the early hours of Sunday, the strongest winds had died down, and the National Weather Service canceled its wind advisory for Seattle, the Eastside, Tacoma, Everett, the islands and most of the lowlands of western Washington. That did not mean power would return immediately: after a storm, downed wires, damaged poles and trees held on lines only by their own weight remain hazards for crews. Seattle City Light and PSE urged residents to stay away from fallen wires and report them to 911 or their utility.
This was not the region’s worst weather disaster in recent years, but memories of November 2024 make any night like this especially unsettling. The so-called “bomb cyclone” then toppled trees across Puget Sound and left hundreds of thousands of customers without power; restoration took days in some areas. The latest front was far less destructive, but once again exposed the vulnerability of this densely populated, heavily wooded region, where power lines run along streets and through yards beneath old tree canopies.
On Sunday, the weather was expected to give utility crews a brief respite: only a few lingering showers were forecast, with calmer conditions by evening. But the break was expected to be short. Meteorologists forecast another rainy, windy front overnight Monday, followed by several more systems during the week. For residents still without power, the next few hours came down to a few simple steps: keep the refrigerator and freezer doors closed, never use generators indoors, and don’t mistake a dark, fallen wire for a harmless part of the rainy-day scenery.
Based on: Seattle power outages linger after windstorm blasts through Western WA