Lake Country Power line crews are making progress today, June 1, to restore electric service with 114 outages left to repair for more than 1,000 co-op members. That’s down from the 8,700 members impacted at the height of the Memorial Day storm.

The majority reside in Itasca County with 500 members remaining without service and 390 more in St. Louis County. Also impacted are parts of Cass County, Lake County and Aitkin County.

For safety reasons, line crews will be sent home at 11:00 p.m. tonight for much needed rest after working 16 hours straight. Stand-by/on-call crews will pick up the workload and continue through the night until the rested crews begin again at 7:00 a.m. for another 16-hour shift tomorrow.

Lake Country Power doesn’t expect service to be fully restored for at least one more day due to the number of broken poles that need replacing. In some hard-hit areas, full sections of line must be rebuilt, which takes time.

The severe holiday storm busted at least 30 poles, blew trees onto power lines, downed power lines and damaged infrastructure. Once the ground is saturated from a lot of rain, it doesn’t allow the trees to hold root during storms that produce sustained high winds. 

Lake Country Power reminds everyone to stay away from downed power lines.

Members may call the cooperative at 1-800-421-9959 to report an outage, or visit the Outage Center online at www.lakecountrypower.coop or http://outage.lcp.coop for an outage status.