Lake Country Power members can expect service to be fully restored by late Sunday night as crews continue making progress in outage restoration work. A 24-hour round-the-clock effort continues as standby crews worked overnight and then passed the baton to nearly 90 men the break of dawn Sunday morning.

Nearly 1,400 members have seen power restored since Sunday morning – with 500 members currently without power and 55 outages to repair. Lake Country Power is on track to restore service by late Sunday night to those who’ve been out for an extended period of time.

New outages are cropping up by snow-laden trees that are finally breaking since the storm. Lake Country Power expects to see more outages from last week’s storm during the next couple weeks as trees struggle to shed the heavy snow. As one Lake Country Power lineworker said, “It’ll be like a ball of ice falling from the trees and it’s going to cause more outages.”

Another Lake Country Power lineworker said, “We need to get members’ power back on today [Sunday] because it’s turned really cold outside – people need to heat their homes.” 

In the Kettle River service area, crews found 40 fallen trees on a line only three-quarters of a mile. Lake Country Power’s tree crews trudged through the snow to chainsaw and remove the trees before line crews could make repairs to restring the lines.

These are the types of discoveries that make it difficult to predict how long the outages will last.

Lake Country Power is very thankful for the mutual aid received from Lake States Construction, BENCO Electric Cooperative, Freeborn Mower Electric Cooperative, Peoples Energy Cooperative and North Itasca Electric Co-op and, mostly recently, McLeod Co-op Power. These assisting linemen will depart from Lake Country Power Monday morning to drive back to their cooperatives.

At the height of the storm last week early Wednesday morning, nearly 12,000 Lake Country Power members were impacted. Crews had more than 500 outage points to assess, repair and restore.

Lake Country Power would like to extend thanks and appreciation to members for their patience, understanding and outpouring of support.

If members experience another outage, they may call Lake Country Power at 800-421-9959 (press 1). For faster reporting, members are encouraged to use SmartHub. The outage map at http://outage.lcp.coop provides an outage status.