What a storm!

I wanted to take a moment to address the significant windstorm event that occurred on February 25th. This storm has proven to be one of the most damaging incidents I’ve monitored in the past 12 years, particularly concerning the PSE infrastructure in Kitsap County. We experienced at least five 115kV transmission lines down, with three located in Port Orchard alone. During severe storms, we typically lose no more than one of these major lines. As a result, 100% of Bainbridge and Vashon Islands, Port Orchard, and a large portion of Bremerton lost power.

For our part, Net253 experienced a three-hour outage from 2:24 AM to 5:54 AM. During this time, our generator encountered an error code, requiring us to restart it in the early hours of the morning. We were out at 4:00 AM, working diligently to restore service for you. Clearing a path through a large maple tree that fell in our front yard was necessary to regain access.

I want to highlight our commitment to maintaining service during these challenging times. To date, we have invested $34,000 in equipment and maintenance to ensure our 50KW generator remains operational, resulting in a total of just 49 hours of runtime. While this translates to approximately $680 per hour to keep your internet services running, we believe this investment is worth it, especially considering the outages experienced by other ISPs in the area. Due to our physical, backhoe/tree proof redundant interconnection to KPUD, our services were unaffected by the infrastructure breaks on Bainbridge.

I commend KPUD for their rapid recovery efforts. They effectively deployed portable generators at critical nodes and benefited from existing stationary standby generators at several well pump sites, which remained operational automatically. By late morning Tuesday, KPUD had restored the vast majority of their county-wide backbone network.

Despite the challenges, I’m proud to say that Net253 successfully maintained service for both residential and business customers throughout the county while larger providers, such as Comcast and CenturyLink, faced city wide outages lasting several days—and in some cases, issues persist even as of the evening of February 27th.

Thank you for your understanding and support during this difficult event. We take pride in our ability to serve you and remain committed to providing the most reliable internet service available in Kitsap County.