Wind knocks out power, trees into houses in North Sound

The gusty winds that blew through the North Sound overnight left a trail of destruction, including knocking trees into power lines and homes.

At the height of the Friday night storm, some 190,000 Snohomish County PUD customers were in the dark.

Power crews have made some headway. But even now, tens of thousands of customers in the North Sound and across Western Washington are still without power.

And there is widespread damage there. So much damage, and so much work to do to get the power back on.

Power crews are working here to do just that.

The wind blew out transformers and knocked trees into houses, too.

The cleanup was well underway at Vi Tran’s South Everett home, after these three trees succumbed to the fierce winds.

“This is out of my imagination,” exclaimed Tran. “Like wholly.”

Tran wasn’t home at about 11 o’clock Friday night when these trees gave way and fell onto his house.

“Yeah, I thought only like a little branch or something fall on top of the roof,” said Tran. “That’s it. But this way off.”

His in-laws, visiting from Texas, were inside.

“But lucky we don’t have anybody at the master (bedroom),” said Van Nguyen, Tran’s sister-in-law. “No. My mom was asleep on the small room. My dad on the other room.”

And they are not alone.

“I was laying in bed watching TV and heard a big wind and that crash on my roof,” said John Caudle.

A few miles south, Caudle was inside his mobile home at Serene Village in Lynnwood when a huge poplar crashed into it.

He heard the tree come down.

“Oh, yeah,” Caudle said. “I heard it hit that thing. And then it knocked all of the things out of my cupboards and everything else.”

Besides trees, the gusty winds knocked out the power over a wide swatch of Snohomish County.

It plunged businesses like this Safeway in Marysville into the dark. And it has remained that way much of this Saturday for them and tens of thousands of other Snohomish PUD customers.

That may be a bit of a silver lining for John Caudle. He does have power. But there is a hole in his roof and rain is sure to return.

“Yeah, and I’ll be putting a tarp on it,” he said, laughing. “I don’t know what else to do.”

Power has been restored for about 90,000 customers. But that leaves still about 100,000 customers in the dark.

Crews started working last night.

They expect to be working for many more hours until they get everybody back on line.

©2022 Cox Media Group