Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
A POWER line lies across a fence in Gurney, Wis., on Thursday morning, with trees bending from ice cover. Xcel Energy crews were repairing the damage from downed pine trees over the lines. With tops of trees snapping off from the ice, it was a dangerous job.
By RALPH ANSAMI
GURNEY, Wis. - Xcel Energy crews were struggling Thursday morning to repair downed lines from the ice storm that began Tuesday night throughout the Gogebic Range.
An Xcel worker from Hayward said four or five separate crews were working on the power lines in the Gurney-Saxon area, from Sears Road to the Frontier Bar along U.S. 2.
By 6 p.m., power had been restored to Gurney residents.
It was a dangerous clean-up effort with pine trees snapping as the lines were being repaired.
Enough progress had been made around 11 a.m. Thursday so electricity could be restored from Sears Road east into Saxon, where the power had been out since 9 p.m. Wednesday.
In the town of Gurney, residents had been without power since early Wednesday morning.
About 3 to 4 inches of snow fell Thursday after the freezing rain hit across the Range and thousands of trees and branches snapped off with the storm.
A combination of snow, sleet and pelting rain on Thursday, with temperatures in the mid-20s, made driving hazardous on area roadways, even as the plow trucks were dumping salt to combat the ice.
The Ironwood weather station at the Gogebic-Iron Wastewater Treatment Plant off Cloverland Drive received about an inch of precipitation for the 24-hour period to 7 a.m. Thursday, after receiving .64 inch the day before.
The snow that followed later Thursday brought April's total precipitation to around 5 inches, twice the normal amount.
The ice storm caused numerous school closures throughout northern Wisconsin and Minnesota on Wednesday.
Power company and county highway officials warned that the trees might continue to fall until the ice melts.
The Superior Telegram reported a transformer blew out in Poplar and caused a sewage overflow on Wednesday at a lift station on County P.
In the Upper Peninsula, 1,400 Upper Peninsula Power Company customers were without electricity on Thursday morning.
Ice build-up on trees that snapped and fell on power lines caused the outages, mostly in the the Copper Harbor and Eagle Harbor areas.
