Workers with Fall City Water District towed a generator between municipal wells Friday morning, pumping drinking water into storage tanks. Power was still out here in east-central King County, like in communities all over the region.

Without these wells pumping, some residents wouldn’t have been able to flush toilets or even turn on their taps. But the water district’s generator let residents get back to some sort of normalcy.

So goes life after the bomb cyclone, three days later.

Gusts of 74 mph coursed through parts of Western Washington on Tuesday, with an easterly force that toppled trees, left half a million customers without power, injured dozens and killed two people.

Then, on Friday, another weather system whipped through the region, with a bit less oomph, as residents were picking up the pieces. The maximum gust at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was 38 mph, with the worst of the winds felt along the coast, where Hoquiam saw 61 mph gusts. A wind advisory remained in place for western Whatcom, Skagit, Island and San Juan counties until 4 a.m. Saturday, as well as an advisory for the north and central coast.

Line workers continued to make progress restoring electricity.

The bulk of the households still in the dark Friday, like Fall City, are served by Puget Sound Energy, an investor-owned utility that provides electricity for about 1.2 million customers. The utility, the largest in the state, reported more than 100,000 without power as of Friday evening.

Snohomish County Public Utility District and Seattle City Light had restored power to about 93% and 98% of their customers, respectively, as of Friday. Snohomish County PUD mostly serves homes and businesses on local distribution lines, while PSE has more high-voltage transmission lines.

More than 400 miles of transmission lines — the gargantuan towers and wires carrying electricity from hydropower, coal and other generating stations to local substations — were “impacted” by the winds, according to PSE. Those winds, which the utility likened to a hurricane, left roughly half of its service area without electricity.

PSE typically has 43 crews available to respond to storm damage. The utility contracted with 100 additional line crews from around the Pacific Northwest — Oregon, Canada and Idaho — to aid in their efforts to replace damaged equipment.

It also flew helicopters to identify damages PSE spokesperson Christina Donegan said. Transmission lines can be hard to reach. They cross the Cascades and in any storm, some crews may have to hike, snowshoe or drive a snowcat to reach damaged lines, Donegan said. PSE said it also saw nearly 50 substations go offline, and “significant” damage on the distribution system to get electricity to local homes and businesses, especially in King County.

Donegan did not have an estimated cost to address the damages or hire contract crews. Donegan said line workers have been working “extensive hours.”

In nearby Snohomish County PUD’s service area, once a major storm is declared, crews work 40 hours straight. Then they get eight hours of rest. After that, they alternate 16- or 24-hour shifts and eight hours of rest.

Fall City residents are accustomed to outages, said Lyn Watts, Fall City Water District commissioner. They live in rural areas surrounded by trees.

Watts said because they had plenty of warning for this storm, his family bought three 5-gallon jugs of gasoline for the generator to keep their refrigerator and heater working.

Cleaning up downed trees and damaged homes will take some time, he acknowledged, but Watts said he feels fortunate to live in a small town where neighbors are coming together to help those in need.

Nearby, Monika Smiltins has been enjoying homemade grilled cheese on the coals of her family’s wood stove, and time to read books she hadn’t gotten around to.

“What’s funny is I had a lot of those little battery-operated tea lights from my wedding and we’ve been putting those all over the house so it’s actually kind of magical at night,” she said. “It looks lovely.”

While they don’t have a generator, Smiltins said the wood stove has been a “saving grace” and the length of the outage has made her consider investing in a gas generator.

“What are they doing?” she said about PSE. “Are they replacing transformers? Are they waiting? It’s been kind of stressful, because everyone’s estimated time of restoration is (Saturday) at noon, and if you look at the map, I don’t think that’s going to be happening.”

A Seattle Public Utilities facility is among PSE’s customers that have been without power since Tuesday. SPU is running a generator to pump water from its diversion dam on the Cedar River at Landsburg to two pipelines that run 7 miles to Lake Youngs Reservoir in Renton.

Donegan said she wasn’t sure how many essential services like schools and hospitals are still without power.

Some PSE customers saw the lights flicker back on Friday, including Eastside grocery stores, where employees raced to restock shelves and dispose of perishables.

In Issaquah, Jim Maynus said he yelled, “Thank you, Lord!” when he saw his business’s “open” sign flicker to life at about 11:30 a.m., the first time since he lost power Tuesday night due to the windstorm.

Within minutes, customers started trickling into Champion Grocery Outlet off Northwest Maple Street and 12th Avenue Northwest, he said.

Maynus, 66, said his store lost about $12,000 in revenue because of the outage, including from dairy products he had to throw away because they couldn’t be refrigerated. The windstorm was the worst he can remember in at least a decade.

“It’s always a big hit, but it’s still doable,” Maynus said. “We’re grateful things weren’t worse.”

At Metropolitan Market in Bellevue, a case that normally holds piles of fish was empty. The adjacent meat section was similarly bare.

Signs taped to nearby refrigerators said store employees were “restocking as quickly as possible” after the power outage.

Down the block, employees at the QFC on Southeast 28th Street clustered in the dairy section Friday morning, removing containers of yogurt from refrigerators and piling them into plastic crates on the floor. Emptied plastic milk jugs lined the shelves of one refrigerator that was sealed shut with red tape. Blue duct tape sealed the doors of another refrigerator holding rows of cheese and eggnog.

Ryan Sailer, an employee monitoring self checkout, said the store lost power at about 8 p.m. Tuesday. Employees had four hours before they had to throw away perishable food items, including meat and dairy, because of food safety rules, he said.

“We’ve just been here doing what we can,” Sailer said.