SEATTLE — An eerie darkness has settled on this North Seattle neighborhood. Power crews are working into the night to get the lights back on. This is what it looked like in the light of day.
Power lines seemingly strewn all about the result of a single-car accident that then sent energized wires lines flying onto I-5.
"Everyone was messaging us, 'Don't go on the freeway!' " said Jennifer Harris, a Bitter Lake neighbor. "So it's insane. I've never seen it like this."
We created this animation to show you what investigators say happened. At about 8 Saturday morning, a driver took a turn a bit too wide at Northeast 125th and 5th Avenue Northeast. He slammed into a power pole.
The pole snapped in two. Its high tension lines came to rest on the road and onto some cars on the freeway.
You can see what happened next. One car flipped onto its side. The roof of another was ripped off. The calamity transformed the highway into a parking lot for more than two long hours.
"I was thankful I wasn't a little bit further," said Cheryl Watts, an eyewitness. "I was glad I stopped for gas."
Watts believes that kept her off I-5 and helped her avoid becoming a casualty.
"I was listening to KIRO radio," said Watts. "And they said do not get out of your car if a power line is on it."
Once the pole was severed, a transformer exploded.
"I got up," said Brian Kemp. "I tried to make coffee and realized oh, no, my power's out, too. This really was an explosion."
Incredibly, just two people suffered minor injuries.
At the height of the outage, nearly 2,200 customers in Bitter Lake were in the dark. City Light says 32 customers are without power.
The news isn't good. City Light is estimating power won't be restored until about 8 Sunday morning, some 24 hours after the power went out.