A rash of power outages in Ballard has some residents and business owners wondering if there is a problem with the City’s electrical infrastructure.

Christy MacDonald, owner of Secret Gardens Book Store on NW Market Street, reported that she had to close her store last Monday October 26 after the power went out at around 8 a.m. and didn’t come back on until around 5 p.m. that evening.

MacDonald believes that the reason for the outages is because the city has not kept up with maintaining its electrical infrastructure while Ballard continues to grow way past the projected 2024 density goal by more than 300 percent.

The outage was one of four that have happened in the last two months. The cause of the outage was an underground transformer failure. The transformer is located at 22nd Avenue NW and NW Market Street. It had a short and burned out after water leaked through a hole in the insulation.

Scott Thomsen with Seattle City Light, said that the recent outages in Ballard were not caused by lack of infrastructure amid a density boom; He said they were caused by a series of different, unrelated events.

“It really was a series of circumstances that hit and do not represent the bigger trend,” said Thomsen.

Thomsen said that the insulation around the transformer, cables and connectors erodes over time, but in this case there was an actual hole, which he said is a rare occurrence. He said that in his nine years working for SCL, he had not seen a hole of this size in a transformer.

Thomsen also said the City’s infrastructure is old and in order to prevent outages SCL injects silicone into the cable and connector insulation.

“Underground equipment has to be insulated, and over time the insulation breaks down and all it takes is a small crack for a short and to burn out equipment.”

The silicone fills cracks in the insulation and protects the circuit from water and shorts. The injection adds another 10 to 20 years to the life of the connection.

Crows caused two other outages that happened toward the end of summer. Thomsen said that the birds pick at the wires to the point of a short in the circuit. Not much of the bird remains.

Thomsen said that the other two outages occurred together. One occurred when a SCL crewmember used a loader to rip into an underground wire during the environmental remediation at the NW Market Street homeless encampment (2826 NW Market Street).

“We don’t want to see people digging up stuff out there but sometimes that happens.”

The outage only affected a few customers. However, another outage occurred at the same time at a switch near Shileshole Marina. The switch was heavily corroded by salt water and malfunctioned, which caused the much larger outage that Ballardites experienced. It affected close to 2000 people.

“I’m really quite frustrated. People aren’t being careful or whatever the reason is -- Crows. Surely by now City Light has learned to protect against crows,” said MacDonald.

But the City does have ways of protecting against crows. Thomsen said that if evidence shows that there is a high volume of problematic bird activity in a given area, SCL would put hood covers over the electrical equipment.

“Is there a pattern? No, but, yes, it was unfortunate that people experience power loss, and we work to prevent that as much as possible.”