FOX VALLEY, WI (WTAQ) – According to We Energies, 95% of utility customers in the Fox Valley without power should have their electrical service restored by the end of Monday night.
Matt Cullen, a spokesman for both We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service, says WPS is still working on an estimate in connection to when power will be restored for those in that company’s service area.
Cullen says, as of 11:30 a.m. Monday, crews had restored power to about 190,000 customers in Wisconsin dating back to Friday.
About 1,000 crews were out on Monday working to restore power.
We Energies and WPS had called in crews from around the Midwest in order to help.
We Energies had 18,350 customers without power across Wisconsin, as of 1 p.m. Monday.
More than 5,000 WPS customers were without power in the Green Bay area, with several other outages around Northeast Wisconsin.
The Central Wisconsin Electric Cooperative had more than 4,700 customers out and Alliant Energy had more than 2,600 customers without power in Wisconsin and Iowa.
Cullen said crews have had to actually rebuild some of the electrical infrastructures in many areas.
“Areas where we’ve had to rebuild circuits have been west of Appleton, Stevens Point, Wabeno, Green Bay. These are areas where we’ve seen very extensive, very damaging effects,” he says.
“We’re talking numerous broken utility poles, we’re talking trees that have been downed over roadways, come down on top of power lines, maybe on top of homes, tree limbs that have been scattered about, downed power lines that have been caused by those storms.”
Additionally, Cullen says that the same storms that moved through Wisconsin on Friday and Saturday — including nine tornadoes confirmed so far by the National Weather Service — also left around 800,000 customers without power in lower Michigan.
“In talking with some people who have been with our companies for a very long time — 20, 30, 40 years, decades of experience — they rank these among the worst storms that they’ve seen,” he says.
He also provided some statistics regarding the work crews have done so far.
By 11:30 a.m. Monday, We Energies and WPS crews had replaced:
- 125,000 feet of wire
- 3,000 fuses
- 100 transformers
- 75 utility poles
