Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By TOM LAVENTURE
Ironwood - Lightning is said to have caused an equipment failure at an Ironwood substation, leading to a Monday morning power outage for much of Gogebic County and northeast Iron County.
The outage occurred around 6:50 a.m. when equipment failed at the Ironwood substation located at Oak Street and Alfred Wright Boulevard, according to Liz Wolf Green, a spokesperson for Xcel Energy, Inc., out of the corporate office for Michigan and Wisconsin in Eau Claire. Approximately 10,633 customers lost service in Hurley, Mercer, Ironwood, Bessemer, Wakefield and Ramsey, according to Wolf Green.
"Based on the equipment damage they believe it was caused by a lightning strike from a small storm in the area," Wolf Green said.
Crews were on scene immediately to isolate the problem and to reroute service while technicians made repairs, Wolf Green said. Power was restored for most customers in around two hours and 10 minutes just after 9 a.m., she said.
The Gogebic County Sheriff's Office said there were outage reports from as far west as Saxon in Wisconsin, to Bergland Township in Michigan. Reports from individual calls noted that power came back on in Wakefield at 10:30 a.m., and that Saxon customers were still without power all morning.
Wolf Green said there were an additional 165 customers that experienced another outage from a failed insulator and a downed transmission line. Service to these customers was back on by 1:30 p.m., she said.
According to Debbie Hohner, clerk for the town of Mercer, some residents received texts and emails alerting them of a power outage in the area but that no outages appeared to have occurred within the town.
The Mercer School District reported some difficulty with the virtual learning students who did not have access to the internet after service providers were affected by the outage, she said.