Residents asked to conserve power in extreme heat

SEATTLE — The extreme heat is continuing to impact people across Western Washington. The University of Washington’s Tacoma campus has cancelled in-person classes until further notice because its electrical system was damaged over the weekend.

UW said a fatal accident Saturday morning in the UWT Cragle Parking Lot caused severe damage to the campus electrical system, resulting in a campus-wide outage.

“I don’t think anybody can do their best learning or teaching in sub optimal conditions,” Griffin

McCullough, a student, said. “I checked my school email a couple of hours ago and I did not see anything in regards to that.” McCullough showed up to campus only to find his class was cancelled due to the outage. Drew Herget told us her mom who is a student, is also impacted.

“Usually on Tuesdays for the summer she attends class at this building right there and usually AC is pretty good when it is working but because of the large heat or the high heat she’s not able to attend class and it’s not hybrid,” Herget said. UW said it is working to find a solution but has no estimation for when power will be restored.

In King County, Puget Sound Energy spokesman Gerald Tracy said they’re not dealing with any heat-related outages at this point, but they are asking customers to conserve energy until 8:00 p.m. Monday evening.

“Short term, conserving energy is one of the simplest and cheapest ways to immediately reduce strain on the grid and long-term conservation helps offset the amount of generation resources we need to meet customer demands when it does peak,” he said. Tracy said they’ve asked customers to do this several times and it’s proven to work.

“Our biggest day over the past year was March 6th where we had our customers save 24 megawatts of energy and now doesn’t sound like a lot but that’s actually enough to power 70 homes for three months,” he said.

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