Power outage hampers 87 Minn. libraries

A power outage in Rochester has made it hard to check out a book in much of southeastern Minnesota.

The Post-Bulletin reports that 87 libraries have been unable to serve customers since Wednesday. The outage from a severe thunderstorm affected nearly 5,000 Rochester Public Utilities customers.

That included the Southeastern Libraries Cooperating building, which has an integrated library system that lets people access 3 million holdings.

The building had its power back by Friday morning, but its computer servers needed more time to restart systematically. Ann Hutton, the system's executive director, says they hope to have the system up and running later in the day.

The 87 libraries affected include five in Houston County, four in Mower County and seven in Fillmore County, and many schools in those counties.

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Information from: Post-Bulletin

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