Except for the Bonneville Power Administration, of course. We buy power from them just like most States in the West do. They're pretty good at maintaining their equipment though.
The City of Seattle does not buy from Bonneville. They generate all their power from hydroelectric power up in the mountains (particularly Snoqualmie Falls and Diablo dam). SnoPUD also buys power from Diablo dam.
Puget Power does buy Bonneville power. It also buys power from a nuke in Eastern Washington, and a couple of coal plants in Western Washington, and from natural gas power plants.
Eastern Washington buys from Bonneville power, the nuke over there, and uses a lot of real estate for wind farms.
The poles are usually not damaged. Sometimes an idiot in a car will take out a pole though. Tree limbs are usually small enough to very temporarily short a couple of primaries together, then burn away or get blown off by the same wind. The system here will detect that and throw the breaker, automatically resetting after three seconds. Usually it holds since the short is no longer there.
Occasionally, a big branch will come down and not burn away. The reset event fails, and the power goes out. In a widespread storm, it can take awhile for crews to locate all the tree branches and remove them. All this work has to be coordinated with the dispatcher at the power company providing the line, and of course, traffic control services. It can take a bit of time to organize all that.
You can always use a generator, but don't allow any of it's output to be fed into the power line. Fully disconnect the power line before you use the generator. That transformer will take your generator output and put 7.2kV on the lines the crews are working on. Most crews will put shorting wires on those lines to protect themselves from such morons, but it does destroy their generators (they deserve it!).
Remember too that these crews to a fantastic job, going around and getting up there to remove all those tree limbs usually during very poor and hazardous weather conditions. My hard hat is off to them!
Ah. Then you didn't live through the Great Snowstorm of '67, like I did. I lived on Somerset at the time. We watched Seattle go out, section by section as each substation blew up when the snow weight crushed the switching and conditioning system at these substations. Many of those were caused by snow and ice plugging the cooling vents for the transformer oil, overheating and destroying said transformer.
There wasn't a light in the city, except for cars. Of course, we didn't have power either. All the Eastside was out as well.
It took a couple of weeks to rebuild all the substation damage. Again, fantastic crews working in freezing temperatures and heavy snow so you can get your power back on.
