A windstorm knocked out power to more than 70,000 customers overnight and caused a sewage spill that has closed the Salmon Creek Greenway Trail.
Sporadic outages continued through Sunday. As of noon, Clark Public Utilities reported that power had been restored to more than 70,000 of its customers in Clark County, with outages still affecting about 1,300 customers scattered throughout the county.
One power outage triggered a sewage spill near a pump station on the west side of Northwest 36th Avenue in Felida near the bridge that spans Salmon Creek, according to Clark County Public Works.
Workers finished cleanup work by about 11:30 a.m, but the western portion of the Salmon Creek Greenway Trail will remain closed until Monday, said public works spokesman Jeff Mize.
The pump station does have a backup generator and other redundancies in case of power failure, Mize said, adding the department will investigate why they didn’t fully work.
The size of the spill had not been determined, but the overall amount was thought to be relatively small.
The pump is back in service, but the county has closed the Salmon Creek Greenway Trail west of Salmon Creek Regional Park as a precaution. The county advised residents to keep themselves, their animals and boats out of the water, thoroughly wash anything that comes in contact with the water and stay out of the area of the pump station.
The bulk of the outages hit overnight Saturday, as winds from an intense low-pressure system began picking up in the metro area around 9 p.m., according to the National Weather Service office in Portland. A 53 mph gust was recorded at 10:27 p.m. on the Interstate 5 Bridge. A gust of of 41 mph was reported from a weather station in Orchards shortly after 11 p.m., with 40 mph gusts at weather stations in Battle Ground and Salmon Creek at about the same time.
Power outages mounted quickly Saturday night, with an initial 4,700 customers reported without power by 10:30, and 44,771 customers in the dark an hour later as the Bonneville Power Administration’s Ross Substation and large section of the BPA transmission system was knocked out of service, affecting large swaths of the county.
Public utilities spokeswoman Erica Erland said the larger batch of outages, within urban Vancouver, came from damage to Bonneville Power Administration-owned high voltage transmission system and the BPA’s Ross Substation.
BPA spokesman Kevin Wingert said a problem with a high-voltage line around 10:45 p.m. led to a breaker failing at the Ross Substation, leading to additional outages at several Clark PUD substations. Power on BPA’s end to the county utility was restored around midnight.
