At least 200,000 people remained without power in the Portland, Oregon, area Sunday after a winter storm blanketed the Pacific Northwest with ice and snow and made travel treacherous.
A spokesperson with PGE said most people won t have to wait long for power to be restored, but there may be some extreme scenarios that customers prepare for.
Some households could be without power for a week, PGE says Megan Allison
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Homeowners in Marion County are comparing the damage from this weekend s storm to a tornado. Thousands of residents in Oregon were left without power as snow and ice blanketed the region Friday into Saturday. On Sunday, a Winter Weather Advisory was replaced with an Ice Storm Warning.
While Governor Kate Brown
declared a state of emergency on Saturday for nine counties in the Willamette Valley, Marion County officials added their own emergency declaration on Sunday, seeking resources to help with blocked roadways and widespread outages.
Filling the Void Photo: Jason E. Kaplan Marion Weatherford at his wheat and wind farm on the Columbia plateau
The growth of wind and solar industries brings a critical source of revenue and jobs to rural counties, and the occasional dustup over land use.
Driving south on Highway 19 from Arlington on the Columbia River, the road climbs steadily through rolling hills. After only a few miles, the road reaches the Columbia plateau, where dryland wheat farms stretch as far as the eye can see.
Marion Weatherford owns a wheat farm on the plateau close to where his family has been farming for five generations. “Our great-great-grandfather came over on the Oregon Trail when he was 16, in 1860,” Weatherford says. In 1881 he started farming wheat.