A warning sent to Puget Sound Energy customers to conserve energy Saturday night appears to have been triggered by a natural gas line outage in Lewis County, according to the utility and other reports.
PSE, which serves several counties in Western Washington, including Pierce and Thurston counties, confirmed the outage Sunday morning.
"We can confirm the Jackson Prairie facility went down Saturday afternoon and was back online in the evening," a spokesperson said in a statement emailed to The Olympian. "It is now fully operational. Investigation has since revealed the outage was due to failed redundant fiber optic cables."
The Huffington Post reported the underground natural gas storage facility in Lewis County "suffered a complete outage, triggering an emergency on the 1,500-mile Northwest Pipeline that ships gas to power plants and heating networks across a region currently struck by arctic weather."
Temperatures were well below freezing Saturday night and Sunday morning.
PSE, which co-owns the Jackson Prairie facility, according to the Huffington Post report, issued the following warning to customers Saturday night:
"We are asking customers to conserve natural gas and electricity use through the evening hours," the social media post reads. "Due to the extreme cold temperatures facing our area, regional utilities are experiencing higher energy use than forecasted, and we need to reduce strain on the grid."
Customers apparently responded to that request, according to a PSE statement released Sunday.
"We saw lower energy demand through the evening hours Saturday, correlated with our message to customers. We appreciate our customers' collective efforts — every little bit makes a big difference," it said.
"We'll continue to monitor as we go through the night and into tomorrow. Temperatures are forecasted to slowly warm up but it still remains cold with a lot of demand on the system."
Temperatures are expected to rise above freezing on Monday and then keep on rising into the low 40s later in the week, according to the National Weather Service in Seattle. Rain is expected to return on Tuesday.
