Seattle City Light told the City Council Sustainability, City Light & Arts and Culture Committee Jan. 17 that its crews restored customers after a November bomb cyclone event and outlined response staffing, mutual aid, recovery steps and mitigation work.

Mike Haines, chief operating officer at City Light, and Brittany Barnwell, the utility’s emergency manager, presented a multi-day timeline of the utility’s response and said City Light deployed line crews, vegetation-management staff and logistics teams before and during the event to prioritize critical facilities, even distribution of service and large-customer outages.

Barnwell said City Light prepositioned crews and scaled staffing across days: 198 personnel in the field on Nov. 19; 551 on Nov. 20; 553 on Nov. 21; and lower but steady field staffing as the response progressed. The utility reported a peak of about 114,000 customers without power — roughly 20% of its customer base — and total field personnel hours of about 20,176 for the event. Barnwell also said there were no injuries during the response.

City Light requested and received mutual-aid assistance and cited Avista and Tacoma Power as contributors to restoration work. The utility coordinated with the city’s Office of Emergency Management, Seattle Department of Transportation, Seattle Public Utilities and Human Services Department; Garfield Community Center operated as a shelter during the event.

Barnwell described the incident command system used in the response — incident commander, public information officer, safety officer, liaison, and separate operations, planning, logistics and finance sections — and said City Light conducted 11 daily incident-management calls (generally two per day) during the activation. Staff also completed an after-action review and said the utility plans to expand its emergency-management program with new positions for training/exercises and hazard mitigation.

Regarding recovery and costs, City Light said small, hard-to-access outages required mutual-aid crews and that debris removal and vegetation clearing remain ongoing. The utility said it has submitted cost data to King County as part of a request for a federal disaster declaration; City Light reported about $1.4 million in incurred costs to date that it expects to put forward for public-assistance funding. Barnwell also provided small-business-administration statistics from King County: as of the report, homeowners had submitted 206 full SBA applications with $135,100 disbursed so far; businesses had 39 full applications with $152,400 disbursed so far.

Council members asked about the factors that contributed to City Light’s restoration speed compared with other regional utilities and about forward-looking mitigation. Councilmember Strauss praised the utility’s incident-management training and Barnwell’s coordination. Barnwell attributed quicker restoration in part to urban service territory characteristics and emphasized the need for local readiness even when federal assistance is expected, noting FEMA declarations and reimbursements can take months.

City Light said it will continue after-action follow-up, demobilize mutual-aid resources after confirming post-event needs, and pursue hazard-mitigation staffing and training to strengthen future responses.

Why it matters: Large winter storms that cause widespread outages impose immediate public-safety and economic costs. The committee briefing gave council members detail about restoration priorities, mutual-aid agreements, recovery costs, and the utility’s plans to strengthen emergency preparedness and community coordination.