BELLEVUE, Wash — Puget Sound Energy (PSE) leadership provided an update on Wednesday afternoon, indicating how the utility company would prioritize power restoration as nearly 300,000 customers remain in the dark.
President and CEO of PSE Mary Kipp said that at its peak, over 400,000 of its customers lost power during the bomb cyclone storm that hit western Washington on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
Kipp said hospitals and schools will be PSE's priority for power restoration.
"We appreciate your patience as our crews try to restore power safely and effectively in the region," Kipp said.
PSE updated its outage map on Wednesday to indicate that it expects power to be back on for many of its customers by Saturday at noon.
PSE said this storm caused one of the largest outages in recent years. It was on par with two storms in the last 20 years. In January 2012, a storm caused an eight-day outage that impacted 476,000 people, and in December 2006, 700,000 people were out of power for multiple days.
In an update on Thursday morning, PSE said power has been restored to 57 schools over the past two days.
KING 5's Allison Sundell contributed to this report.
