Enumclaw, hit with cyclone’s highest winds, recovers without power

Ann Kellogg was warming up in the sun on her Enumclaw doorstep around noon Wednesday, relieved her night of fear and tears was over.

In front of her, a large tree laid in front of her yard, which had brought down power lines with it. Last night, Kellogg worried winds — which reached 74 mph around 9 p.m. — would blow in her windows. It sounded like a tornado.

“Oh my God. It was super, super scary. I cried, a lot,” Kellogg said. “We always get really bad wind but not like last night.”

The 12,000-person town 32 miles southeast of Seattle was hit with the strongest winds in Western Washington on Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service. Maddie Kristell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said Tuesday’s storm was unusual not only because of how strong the winds were but because they were coming from the southeast.

“Trees are a little less resilient to that wind direction because it’s just not the norm,” Kristell said. “It’s a contributing factor to why we saw the amount of damage and power outages that we did.”

As of Wednesday night, more than 331,000 Puget Sound Energy customers remained in the dark, down from about 382,000 at noon and about 474,000 at 1 a.m.

More Seattle homes were without power during the peak of the windstorm than at any time in nearly 20 years, a city spokesperson said, with some 112,600 customers without power late Tuesday. Seattle City Light reported 21,000 customers still powerless by 8 p.m. Wednesday.

Agencies expect restoration efforts could take several days.

Kellogg said she heard the tree fall in front of her house around 6:52 p.m. along with an electrical fizzling sound next to her house.

When she went outside to check, she saw the tree had pulled wiring off the side of her house, and she could smell burning wires. She called the fire department, which inspected her walls and advised her to stay inside because of downed power lines around the neighborhood.

Her neighbor, Sophie Keene, said she could see and hear similar electrical malfunctions around the neighborhood.

“Things were exploding, like, everywhere,” said Keene. “Like the transformers over by the park. One blew big, it looked like fireworks just going off.”

The sound another resident, Pam Walasek, remembers is the “boom” she heard when a tree hit the corner of her home around 9:30 p.m.

“It sounded like a tractor hitting concrete,” Walasek said.

She and her husband went outside with flashlights and saw the tree had ripped open a hole in their roof. Her husband, a contractor, decided to staple a tarp to the roof to keep rain from getting in.

Walasek stood by holding the ladder.

“He’s up there with 65-mile-an-hour gusts, and he’s got the tarp. And I’m like, ‘If the wind catches the tarp, drop it.’ You know, I don’t want him blown away,” Walasek said.

Even with a hole in her house, she says it could have been worse.

“The size of that tree, we were very lucky,” Walasek said.

Residents said the wind quieted down around two or three in the morning.

On Wednesday morning, neighbors were clearing debris from their yards, assessing damage to their homes and decompressing. They checked on each other in person — most didn’t have power or internet throughout the day.

Walasek, who has a generator, brought coffee to her neighbors in the morning.

Power lines lay in the middle of the street. Fences were toppled in many places. But city administrator Chris Searcy wrote an email on his phone that said workers were clearing trees and limbs to open Enumclaw’s streets, and the city was otherwise functioning as normal.

“Really we are just waiting for power to be restored. Most businesses are closed today due to the lack of power, including fueling stations,” Searcy wrote.

For most residents, the damage from the storm was relatively modest — overturned garbage cans or fallen branches.

Gary Protto, a retiree, inspected a fence he had installed two years ago and his wife’s rose bushes that had been torn apart by the storm. He was upbeat as he worked to restore both.

“This is just the price you pay for living in a beautiful little town near the foothills of the Cascades.”