Power, cable crews gearing up for possible outages

SEATTLE — Seattle City Light and Comcast say they are getting crews on standby to respond to more power and cable outages.

During storms on Oct. 25-26. Seattle City Light said that 70,963 customers lost power.

"After a week of heavy rains that means the soils are saturated and the trees are loose and on top of that it's very early in the season and that means the trees have leaves on them and it acts like a sail," said Roberto Bonaccorso, spokesperson for Seattle City Light.

He's hopeful that more leaves have fallen off of trees, and will be less likely to break off this time.

However, crews are still gearing up for outages.

"We need to be on top of it. we need to be aware of the weather coming and have people on standby and recall people from home if they need to," said Bonaccorso.

He added that if your house loses power, be sure to call Seattle City Light.

While City Light can track neighborhoods without power, it's not always clear if power is lost at an individual house.

"Ultimately there's only so much we can do. we can monitor the lines. we can trim ahead of time we can prepare our crews but it's really up to our customers to anticipate these things," said Bonaccorso.

As a precaution, Seattle City Light is also working to clear tree branches near about 600 miles of power lines by the end of the year.

Cable crews are also getting ready for possible outages.

"First and foremost we want to apologize for the inconveniences but secondly, we are working on it, we're on top of it, we're very well aware of the outrages through the services we have to monitor our network," said Steve Kipp, Comcast spokesperson.

Kipp said that often times when power is restored and cable isn't many people are confused.

"That's largely because we're waiting for the power crews to complete their work before we can come and make sure that our network is okay and make any repairs that we need to make," said Kipp.

"We're monitoring the weather we're putting crews on standby we always have crews on duty at all hours of the day," said Bonaccorso.

KIRO