December 17, 4 p.m.: Lake Country Power is reporting progress in an organized effort to restore electric service for the members who remain out of power from last week’s winter storm. The co-op is working at maximum capacity this weekend.
More than 80 men have boots on the ground as they work through wet, cold and tiring conditions. Lake Country Power is very thankful for the mutual aid received from Lake States Construction, BENCO Electric Cooperative, Freeborn Mower Electric Cooperative, Peoples Cooperative and North Itasca Cooperative.
Since Tuesday, December 13, service has been restored for more than 8,600 members after the first and second wave of storms happened.
As of 3:30 p.m., Saturday, more than 3,000 members are without service. Crews have nearly 300 separate outages to assess, repair and restore.
Each crew is assigned to restore service for one feeder at a time for safety reasons. If you place too many lineworkers on a feeder it can be dangerous for unknown back feeding of power on the lines.
In addition to broken lines, crews are working to replace three broken poles in the Kettle River service area, one pole in the Cohasset area and two poles in the Mountain Iron area. There could be more broken poles the crews may find as work continues. Broken poles take time to replace.
Estimated Timeframes
Members located in the northern part of Lake Country Power’s service area should see service restored by late tonight – Saturday. The plan is to send LCP’s Mountain Iron crews to help work the co-op’s southern service territory Sunday morning – primarily Carlton County and Pine County.
Crews are working 24 hours around the clock with the greatest number of personnel working from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m. Standby crews will work overnight Saturday and then the rotation will begin again Sunday morning until all members are fully restored with electric service.
Lake Country Power is hopeful to have most, if not all, outages restored by late Sunday night – unless any setbacks happen from the elements. Some individual and harder-to-reach outages may remain into Monday, but Lake Country Power’s goal is full restoration by Sunday night.
The co-op is aware of the forecasted cold weather starting early Monday morning and is advising members to prepare now for continency plans to stay warm – just in case any individual outages remain into Monday.
Lake Country Power appreciates the patience, understanding and outpouring of support for its crews and operations team as they continue working together to assess, repair and restore the outages.
Members may call Lake Country Power at 800-421-9959 to report outages. For faster reporting, members are encouraged to use SmartHub. Please visit the outage map at http://outage.lcp.coop for an outage status.