Substation explosion and fireball reported in Washington state
Feb 2017Published 15 Sept 2026Responsible editor: Chief Editor
- Where
- substation in Washington state
- What
- explosion and fireball from equipment failure
- Injuries
- None reported
- Cause
- equipment failure at the substation
Get the next one by email
Free alerts on grid infrastructure incidents in the United States, and an email when EIR-0856 is updated. No account needed; unsubscribe in one click.
Confirm your email and every substation and transformer incident on the register arrives at once as a spreadsheet (CSV), free.
Get a free sample brief Three complete verified records and the incidents-per-GW table, by email within a minute.
We will also email you about the register's paid records and plans, at most once a week and three times in all. You can stop these at any time. By signing up you agree to the privacy policy.
What happened
Video broadcast by a US news outlet showed a large fireball and thick black smoke rising from a substation in Washington state on a Wednesday night in mid-February 2017. The report attributes the event to equipment failure at the substation and says about 10,000 residents were left without power. No one was injured. The substation, its operator, the specific equipment involved and the duration of the outage were not reported.
Contributing factors
Reported as equipment failure at the substation. No further detail on the failed component or the underlying cause has been published.
Lessons learned
- Substation equipment failure can escalate within seconds to an explosion and fireball, so operators should inspect and monitor high-voltage plant condition.
- A single substation failure can cut power to thousands of customers, so networks need redundancy and rapid switching.
- Early reports rarely name the failed component, so operators must treat the cause as unconfirmed until findings are published.
More lessons on detection and monitoring, outages, backup supply and restoration, from every incident on the register.
Not yet known
- Specific equipment involved
- Duration of the outage
- Operator of the substation
- Underlying cause of the failure
This entry is updated when these are reported. Get an alert for the next one like it.
Source
Published 2026-09-15. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.
