Tuesday’s bomb cyclone affected nearly everyone in Western Washington—albeit unevenly. The windstorm killed two people, left more than half a million homes without power, shuttered schools, grocery stores, and medical centers, and felled towering trees between the Cascade foothills and the Pacific coastline.

In the two days since the storm, lineworkers have hustled to restore electricity for nearly a quarter-million families, cleared roads of tree trunks and other detritus, and brought power back to more than 50 schools. The recovery has been a historic, urgent megaproject on the backs of individual workers. Snohomish Public Utility District journeyman foreman Jeff Roberts told The Seattle Times that he shied away from caffeine during his 40-hour shift restoring lines, powered instead by a motivation to help his neighbors get their power back. He said he and his colleagues were “having fun” and “love this stuff.” Around 23,000 homes stayed without power in Snohomish PUD’s jurisdiction on Thursday afternoon, down from a high of 160,000.

Further south in Enumclaw, residents faced the fiercest winds of anyone in Western Washington, confronting gusts up to 75 miles per hour. They reported exploding transformers that “looked like fireworks just going off,” as well as downed power lines and damaged homes. Puget Sound Energy, which powers Enumclaw and over a million customers in the region, recorded ongoing outages at 247,580 homes as of Thursday afternoon. Meanwhile, nearby Crystal Mountain Resort announced that it is “excited” to open to passholders on Friday, buoyed by recent weather. (It’ll offer free cocoa and doughnuts on Friday and Saturday.)

Some of the fallout from the storm is striking but somewhat temporary: dozens of Teslas lining up in a Northgate parking lot for a charge; equally serpentine queues for gas in Covington and elsewhere; Seattle librarians checking out books by lantern light.

“Like the line crews that work around the clock, our store and support staff work tirelessly to ensure that we are able to welcome and serve customers at all locations,” said Natalie Cheel, a PCC spokesperson. 

For all the symbolic juxtapositions, like some Washingtonians waiting until Sunday for electricity while others bomb down corduroy-groomed ski runs at Crystal, it’s worth inspecting the more benign machinations that may affect local governments’ ability to weather future windstorms—including the severe wind forecast for Friday, with gusts expected up to 50 miles per hour—and keep everyone safe.

On Tuesday evening, a 65-year-old woman died in Bellevue’s Bridle Trails neighborhood after a tree crashed through her home; another woman in her 50s died when a tree fell onto her at a homeless encampment in a Snohomish County forest. Though many news outlets have stated that the encampment was in Lynnwood, Nathan MacCormick, a spokesperson for the City of Lynnwood, clarified that the encampment was located in unincorporated Snohomish County—at a confusing confluence of city and county borders—making the site fall under the purview of the Snohomish County Department of Emergency Management. “Either way, it's just a real tragic situation,” he said, adding that there's a “conversation to be had… [in] the region as a whole” about extreme weather protocols for the county’s emergency shelters, and discussing the meteorological threats that warrant opening them. (That could help service providers bring people inside during lethal windstorms and could clarify jurisdictional responsibility in borderland territories like the one where someone died on Tuesday.)

Congruently, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority told people on social media to “seek shelter” before the storm, admitting at the same time that, although “it is still a dangerous situation,” the bomb cyclone did not “meet our current activation thresholds.” Lisa Edge, KCRHA’s acting chief of external affairs, told Seattle Met that it had shared a list of shelters via email on Tuesday.

“Our current severe weather policy addresses cold weather and precipitation, heat, and wildfire smoke,” she said. “We're currently holding internal meetings to discuss how best to respond to windstorms, since this was outside the normal weather patterns we experience. We are not activating later this week.”