Power Line Crews Restore More Oregon Storm Outages

Southeast Portland, Beaverton, and the Portland West Hills still have concentrations of more than 1,000 customers without power.

Salem-News.com

(SALEM, Ore.) - PGE crews say they have cut the outage totals by more than half during the past two hours. The utility reports about 16,000 without power right now, down from about 35,000 during the noon-hour.

With wind gusts lowering to under 30 miles per hour, and more than 200 PGE repair people in the field, several major feeder lines were connected in Southeast Portland, Salem,Washington County, Silverton, the West Hills, Molalla and other areas.

Southeast Portland, Beaverton, and the Portland West Hills still have concentrations of more than 1,000 customers without power.

PGE prioritizes outage response according to safety first, which means downed lines and critically needed customers such as hospitals and fire stations.

Their next priority they say is impact: restoring lines that serve the most customers.

The transmission lines, the "super highways" are restored first, followed by feeder lines, the equivalent of arterial streets, followed by individual neighborhoods.

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East Multnomah County still has relatively few outages at this hour.

If you see a downed utility line, any line, don't touch it, don't even go near it. Don't attempt to clear debris from roads near downed lines or hanging lines. Call PGE.

Salem residents should call 503-399-7717, Portland residents should call 503-464-7777, and residents throughout the rest of Oregon should call 1-800-544-1795 for outages or downed lines.