A swath of power outage from the Hill’s western slope along E Olive Way all the way to E Pine’s eastern stretches in the Central District left about 6,500 customers in the dark Thursday morning, Seattle City Light said.

With a report of wires down near E Denny and Belmont Ave E around 9:30 AM, Seattle Fire was called to handle the emergency while City Light deployed crews to sort out how to repair the damaged wires and restore power to the area.

Monday, thousands of customers went dark after a branch fell on wires. That outage lasted only a few hours but some businesses and schools in the area closed for the day.

During Thursday’s outage, social media reports said stores including Central Co-op and Trader Joe’s were cleared of customers after the power loss. Radio station KEXP and others went off the air as their equipment in the area on the tall E Madison TV and radio towers also lost power.

While the outage is the second disruption in service in the week for the area, City Light’s infrastructure around Capitol Hill has been particularly resilient thanks to the under-grounding of wires around many parts of the Hill and upgrades that have come with the waves of redevelopment and increased investment in power systems to keep Capitol Hill Station online.

UPDATE: Margo also has provided pictures of the downed wire that started the whole thing:

UPDATE x2 2:10 PM: The good news is Seattle City Light has sorted out what happened and restored power to thousands. But for an unlucky 1,200 or so customers around the POWHAT area of the Hill, sorry, but you might be in the dark through Friday morning.

In an afternoon update, City Light said a contractor “dug up an underground line, causing a voltage spike, ultimately causing the overhead wires on Denny to come down.”

“For the group of 1,228 customers out, our Underground crews are working to restore the underground line which will take much longer. Currently, the estimated restoration time is 6 a.m. on Friday,” City Light writes.

If you know somebody who resides in the Pine–Olive Way–Howell Area Triangle, maybe invite them over tonight.

[CAPITOL HILL OUTAGE UPDATE THREAD]

Hello,

Thank you for your patience as we were gathering more information about this morning's outage. We have identified the cause and updated the estimated restoration time. — Seattle City Light (@SEACityLight) September 12, 2019

UPDATE 9/13/19 8:15 AM: City Light crews worked through the night and reported restoration of power early Friday morning:

{Morning update Capitol Hill outage} Power was restored earlier this morning to all customers impacted by the Capitol Hill outage. Again, we thank you for your patience and hope this puts you back on track for a great weekend. pic.twitter.com/hYCr3QjLDx — Seattle City Light (@SEACityLight) September 13, 2019