Whatcom County Power Outages: What the Data Actually Says

This is the part almost nobody knows. Puget Sound Energy files an annual Service Quality and Electric Service Reliability Report with the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission under Docket UE-072300 / UG-072301. Because of a requirement originating in WUTC Docket UE-110060, that filing includes an appendix breaking reliability down by county, not just system-wide.

Two industry-standard measures appear in it:

• SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index): the average total minutes a customer was without power over the year.
• SAIFI (System Average Interruption Frequency Index): the average number of times a customer lost power over the year.

Each is reported two ways. The "total" figure counts every interruption of one minute or longer, including major storm events. The adjusted figure (PSE labels these "SQI SAIDI" and "SAIFI 5%") excludes major event days using the IEEE T-MEDADJ method. The gap between those two numbers is the whole story of power reliability in this county.

Read 2018 again, because it is the most useful row on the table. Excluding major storms, the typical Whatcom customer lost power for 134 minutes that year, a little over two hours. Counting the storms, it was 590 minutes, nearly ten hours. The storms are not a rounding error on top of normal outages. In a bad year they are roughly four fifths of your total time without power. That is the single most important fact on this page, and it is the reason backup power decisions in this county should be made around multi-hour and multi-day events rather than around brief flickers.

PSE's own narrative in that filing names the cause directly: "Whatcom and Island Counties declined across all four measures due to more customers impacted by tree related outages," and an earlier year is attributed to "higher than average tree related outages impacting customers in Whatcom, Skagit and Island Counties." Trees and wind, not equipment failure, are the dominant local driver.

Averages hide the events people actually remember. These are specific, dated, and sourced.

November 15, 2021, Nooksack River flooding. 865 PSE customer addresses in Whatcom County were without power as of 7:30 a.m., part of more than 13,000 across PSE's regional service area (Whatcom News, November 15, 2021). NOAA's Storm Events Database separately logs a Whatcom County flood event on November 14, 2021 with $34.00 million in property damage, and a second flood on November 28, 2021 with $8.50 million. NOAA's high wind entry for Western Whatcom County over November 14 to 16 records an estimated 52 mph gust, with a narrative noting trees down across Western Whatcom County blocking all of Interstate 5 near milepost 246.

November 11, 2023, overnight windstorm. More than 3,500 PSE customer addresses in Whatcom County lost power, out of roughly 28,000 regionally. Reported gusts were 56 mph at Bellingham International Airport and 67 mph at a Ferndale station, after midnight (Whatcom News, November 11, 2023). One caveat worth stating: NOAA's Storm Events Database has no entry for this event in any Whatcom-area zone, so local reporting is the only source. We are citing it anyway because it is dated, specific, and contemporaneous, but you should know the federal database does not corroborate it.

November 19 to 20, 2024, the bomb cyclone. NOAA logged a high wind event for Western Whatcom County with an estimated 50 mph gust. Its episode narrative describes "extensive tree damage in the Puget Sound region that resulted in damaged homes and vehicles, widespread prolonged power outages, and 2 fatalities from fallen trees," and its event narrative specifically records "widespread tree damage occurred, including trees on homes and cars in Sudden Valley, WA." Regional reporting a week later put roughly 5,700 households still without power system-wide, with the large majority in and around King County (My Bellingham Now, November 25, 2024). We could not find a Whatcom-specific customer count for this storm and are not going to invent one. The system-wide figure is included here with its true scope stated.

June 21, 2025, Bellingham. More than 4,700 PSE customer addresses in the Columbia and Barkley neighborhoods lost power, with the cause listed as under investigation rather than weather (Whatcom News, June 21, 2025).

October 13, 2025, north Whatcom. More than 2,000 PSE customer addresses lost power with gusts over 40 mph, attributed to trees and vegetation (Whatcom News, October 13, 2025).

We are an electrical contractor, so treat the following as our read rather than as data:

A brief outage is not a backup power problem. Excluding storms, the typical customer here loses power on the order of two to four hours across an entire year. No equipment purchase is justified by that alone.

Storm outages are the real exposure, and they are long. The 2018 Whatcom numbers and the 2024 system-wide numbers both show storm events driving the total up by a factor of four or more. If you are considering backup power, size the decision against a multi-hour to multi-day November windstorm, not against a flicker.

Trees are the cause, which affects who is most exposed. PSE's own filings attribute Whatcom's declines to tree-related outages. Homes on wooded lots, on long rural feeders, and at the ends of lines generally see worse outcomes than homes on short urban circuits, though we want to be clear that PSE does not publish a rural-versus-in-town restoration comparison for this county, so we cannot put a number on that difference.

Well water changes the math. If your home is on a well rather than city water, an outage takes your water with it. That is a different category of problem than a dark living room, and in our experience it is the single most common reason rural Whatcom customers move from thinking about backup power to actually installing it.

If you want to work through whether backup power makes sense for your specific house, the honest version of that conversation involves your actual loads and your actual panel. Our generator installation page covers how we approach that, including the sizing and permit steps.