Wisconsin Public Service
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — Power outages caused by high winds overnight Wednesday and Thursday caused quite the headache for Wisconsin residents, and the Wisconsin Public Service crews tasked with bringing power back.
Matt Cullen with WPS says that 60 mile per hour winds caused quite a bit of damage to their power grid, and continuing wind gusts through the day Thursday made repair difficult.
“They’ve been facing challenges such as having to remove downed trees, replace broken utility poles, and repair numerous downed power lines that were damaged by those destructive winds,” Cullen told WTAQ Thursday. “Unfortunately repairs in some areas are going to take much longer and customers should expect an extended outage.”
According to the WPS outage map, just under 40,000 people across their network are still affected by outages as of 2:30 pm. Cullen says that they’ll have estimated restoration times this evening.
“Our crews are making progress and they are working tirelessly until they can make all of those repairs,” Cullen added.
The good news is that the problem was foreseen ahead of time.
“As we see severe weather potential, we start taking inventory of our equipment,” said Cullen. “That way our crews have the equipment necessary so that they can respond to outages.”
It could have been worse. Weather officials say damage would have been much more severe if leaves had been on the trees.
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