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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

I live in an area northwest of Houston.

We had similar outages (though not as long) in May (serious storm, but not a hurricane)

In many cases, it's the result of winds knocking trees into powerlines. I feel like preventative maintenance could mitigate this. A big factor is likely our deregulation: the electricity provider isn't the company billing end customers.

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I live in Seattle’s Ballard area, but work with people on the east side. Big storms blow down branches all the time on the other side of the lake, causing power outages. We have less trees here in Seattle, comparatively, or maybe Seattle power and light is better at tree maintenance, but ya lots of trees = lots of power outages from what I can infer.

Some richer communities on the east side bury their lines so power outages are more rare.

Downtown Ballard had a lot of power outages over the last two years. Apparently they were using a different transformer than everywhere else, all of which are getting old, and some procurement mistake lead to the spare parts being back-ordered by a year.

(This is second hand through a neighbor who actually went and bothered them about all the outages, so there are probably mistakes.)

Using different equipment from the rest of Seattle is very Ballard.

Ya, I live on 60th, so 4 blocks north of market, and it’s weird that they get power outages to about 56th or 57th while we never do.

The delivery price is regulated like it was pre-deregulatuon and is a separate line item in pretty much everyone's bill.

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