SPOKANE, Wash. — The unprecedented Northwest U.S. heat wave that slammed Seattle and Portland, Oregon, moved inland Tuesday — prompting a electrical utility in Spokane, Washington, to resume rolling blackouts amid heavy power demand.
Officials said more than a half-dozen deaths in Washington and Oregon may be tied to the intense heat that began late last week.
The dangerous weather that gave Seattle and Portland consecutive days of record high temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit was expected to ease in those cities. But inland Spokane saw temperatures spike.
The National Weather Service said the mercury reached 109 F in Spokane— the highest temperature ever recorded there.
About 9,300 Avista Utilities customers in Spokane lost power on Monday and the company said more planned blackouts began on Tuesday afternoon in the city of about 220,000 people.
“We try to limit outages to one hour per customer,” said Heather Rosentrater, an Avista vice president for energy delivery.
She said about 2,400 customers were without power as of shortly after 2 p.m. Tuesday, mostly on the north side of the city, and those customers had been alerted about the planned outage.
About 21,000 customers were warned Tuesday morning that they might experience an outage, she said.
Avista had to implement deliberate blackouts on Monday because “the electric system experienced a new peak demand, and the strain of the high temperatures impacted the system in a way that required us to proactively turn off power for some customers,” said company president and chief executive Dennis Vermillion. “This happened faster than anticipated.”
Rosentrater said the outages were a distribution problem, and did not stem from a lack of electricity in the system
Meanwhile, authorities said multiple recent deaths in the region were possibly related to the scorching weather.
The King County Medical Examiner’s office said two people died due to hyperthermia, meaning their bodies had became dangerously overheated.
The Seattle Times reported they were a 65-year-old Seattle woman and a 68-year-old Enumclaw, Washington, woman.
The heat may have claimed the life of a worker on a nursery in Oregon, the state’s worker safety agency, known as Oregon OSHA, said on Tuesday.
The man who died was from Guatemala and had apparently arrived in the United States only a few months ago, said Andres Pablo Lucas, owner of Brother Farm Labor Contractor that provided workers for the nursery, including the man who died.
The man, whose name was not disclosed, died at Ernst Nursery and Farms, a wholesale supplier in St. Paul, 20 miles north of Salem, on Saturday amid sweltering temperatures. An Oregon OSHA database listed the death as heat-related.
“The employee was working on a crew moving irrigation lines. At the end of the shift he was found unresponsive in the field,” said agency spokesman Aaron Corvin.