Keweenaw Report Your Source for Local News and Sports
THIS STORY HAS BEEN UPDATED AS OF 8:15 FRIDAY MORNING.
Slowly but surely, electrical crews are restoring power to areas hit by Wednesday’s severe storm.
UPPCO spokesman Brett French told us this morning that around 1,200 customers remain without power. Higher figures shown earlier this morning on the company’s online outage map were not correct. The map was knocked out by a fiber optic network disruption Wednesday afternoon. While it is now showing numbers again, technicians are still trying to resolve damage from corrupted files, which is causing it to display unreliable data.
French said the largest remaining outages are affecting about 200 customers in the Houghton area, and 300 in the Ishpeming area. The remaining outages are small – typically one or two customers, up to as many as 30. He thinks almost all will have power restored by the end of the day, although there may be a few that linger into tomorrow.
You can follow the UPPCO Twitter feed here.
Ontonagon REA has offered no specific updates. A message that was updated on their outage call line early this morning indicated the company was still working on numerous outages across its service area.
Repairs have been hampered by the heavy, wet snow that fell at the beginning of Wednesday’s storm. Snow-laden limbs and trees continue to collapse onto lines, causing new outages, and undoing repairs that have been completed.
Another winter storm is predicted to hit the area Saturday evening and Sunday. Preliminary reports predict up to 13 inches, with heaviest amounts south of the Keweenaw Peninsula.
