Second night of severe storms leaves damage, power outages across wide swath of Minnesota
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Tens of thousands of Minnesota homes and businesses remained without power Tuesday after severe storms rolled across the state for a second consecutive night.
The storms late Monday brought hurricane-force winds to parts of the state — with numerous reports of trees and power lines down from central Minnesota, through the Twin Cities and toward Rochester and Winona.
Xcel Energy reported about 140,000 customers were without power across Minnesota and western Wisconsin at the peak of the outages after Monday night’s storms. That number dropped below 40,000 in Minnesota as of 12:30 p.m., with Xcel saying it had more than 2,000 employees and contractors working to restore power.
The storms knocked a power line down across a stretch of busy Highway 55 in Plymouth, forcing authorities to close the highway until the line was removed.
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And in the eastern Twin Cities metro, the storms knocked out power to about a third of the city of Stillwater.
Mayor Ted Kozlowski said city crews worked until around 3 a.m. Tuesday, clearing downed trees from streets. That work continued later Tuesday.
“It’s a lot of branches and limbs. There’ll definitely be the hum of chainsaws in Stillwater for probably the next few days,” he said.
“I think we just got pretty lucky,” Kozlowski said. “There were a lot of very near-misses in town with very large trees, that, you know, we just got really fortunate that didn’t cause a ton of damage. There are a couple homes that suffered some serious damage, but no injuries.”
Nearby, traffic signals were out along parts of Highway 36, causing significant travel delays during the Tuesday morning commute.
There were also reports of trees down in Paynesville, Edina, Dellwood, South St. Paul, Eden Prairie, Belle Plaine and Montgomery, among many other communities with storm damage.
Xcel Energy spokesperson Trisha Duncan said the company had crews ready to respond, in anticipation of the storms. She said the back-to-back storms Sunday and Monday nights made for a lot of work.
“We did tackle the first storm and get most of those customers back on, and then the second storm came through, so that kind of took us backwards,” Duncan said. “Still, we’ve made great progress.”
Duncan said Xcel crews are working to repair the largest outages first, followed by smaller outages.
In addition to Xcel Energy, smaller utilities also reported significant power outages. Minnesota Valley Electric Cooperative reported about 1,000 customers without power as of sunrise Tuesday — down from more than 7,000 in the immediate wake of the storms.
“It’s going to be a long night, overnight and Tuesday for our crews,” MVEC reported in an update late Monday. “While we wish we could reach every outage at once, restoration takes time. Our priority is to restore power to the greatest number of members as quickly and safely as possible, starting with the largest outages and then working our way down, or sometimes moving to the next closest outage location.”
The National Weather Service reported wind gusts of 76 mph at Stewartville, 74 mph at Kasson, 70 mph near Owatonna, 68 mph near Lake City and 65 mph in Shakopee. There were widespread reports of large trees and branches downed by the storms.
The storms also brought more heavy rain and flooding to Stevens County in western Minnesota following flash flooding over the weekend. A flood warning for Stevens County — including the Morris and Chokio areas — was extended until 4 p.m. Tuesday.
The National Weather Service also issued flood warnings for parts of the Minnesota River in western Minnesota, as the river rises due to stormwater runoff.
Western Wisconsin also saw storm damage Monday night — including areas near Somerset, Prescott and Stockholm. Iowa also was hit by severe storms that produced winds of nearly 100 mph.
