A screenshot of Zachary Yamada’s power restoration tracker for the outages following the February 2021 ice storm.
A Salem cybersecurity consultant has set up a website for Oregonians to track the pace of Portland General Electric’s power restoration efforts following ice storms that left more than 300,000 houses and businesses without power this week.
Zachary Yamada built the site this week, hosting it through his company, Blue Citrus. The site uses PGE’s outage data to report the percentage of customers in each affected county who had power restored since outages peaked earlier this week.
Yamada said he’s been without power at his south Salem home since last Friday night and wanted to create something to give more context for Oregonians who are eagerly awaiting their lights coming back on. He’s been charging his devices at the office, he said.
“While PGE has been doing an outstanding job of reporting the current number of outages at pretty much any given time, there isn’t much historical data and so it felt kind of hard to conceptualize the progress being made. I thought that recording and charting the progress over time would not only add some context to the situation in Oregon but also give folks solstice in being able to see that steady progress is being made in most of the affected areas,” Yamada said in an email.
-Rachel Alexander
