Power outages in northwest Oregon down to around 10,000 nearly two weeks after winter storm

Utility workers appeared to be entering the home stretch of service restoration as roughly 10,000 customers in northwest Oregon remained without power Tuesday morning, a small fraction of the more than 400,000 who lost power in a strong winter storm.

The majority of outages, about 5,000, remained in the hardest hit areas of Clackamas County centered around Canby and Oregon City. On Monday, Portland General Electric President Maria Pope said she couldn’t provide an exact date that power would be completely restored to those areas.

Pope said the last stretch of restorations were the most difficult for crews, because they were working on outages that bring back power to only a few customers at a time, making the process slower. Some of those customers could be waiting up to six more days for power to come back on, according to the utility.

Marion County still had around 4,500 customers without power with the most stubborn outages in and around Silverton and Woodburn. The remaining outages were spread across Multnomah, Polk, Yamhill, Washington and Hood River counties.

The utility was hobbled by a series of winter storms that began Feb. 12 with multiple waves of snow and ice that brought down thousands of trees and power lines. At one point, more than 420,000 customers lost power, some of whom have been without service for nearly two weeks.