Engineers from Clallam County Public Utility District are looking into the cause of a malfunction that cut electrical power to thousands of customers Monday.
About 15,000 PUD customers from just east of the Port Angeles city limit to Diamond Point were without power for more than five hours, distribution systems engineer Dave Proebstel said.
The outage was first reported at about 11:45 a.m.
Proebstel said power was restored region by region until Diamond Point customers were back online by 5 p.m.
In an unrelated outage, the power went out in a section of western Sequim about 6:50 p.m. Monday. Power was restored shortly after 8 p.m.
69-kilovolt line damaged?
Initial speculation on the cause of the bigger power failure Monday morning pointed to a fallen tree limb that damaged a 69-kilovolt transmission line in the Blyn area.
But work crews and engineers from PUD continued Monday afternoon to pin down what happened, he said.
Proebstel said the massive outage was a matter of timing, as the utility district is in the process of upgrading its transmission line to 115 kilovolts.