Thousands without power in wake of Minnesota storms, with more sweltering heat on the way
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With another day of sweltering heat on the way for much of Minnesota — thousands of homes and businesses were without power across the state on Tuesday.
That was in the wake of several rounds of severe weather on Monday — followed by more strong storms overnight and early Tuesday.
Those early morning storms produced winds of more than 70 mph in southern Minnesota. The National Weather Service received reports of 76 mph gusts near Bingham Lake, and a 73 mph gust near Jackson.
A separate batch of storms brought wind gusts of more than 50 mph to the Iron Range in northeast Minnesota overnight.
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“It was really that second wave that did the most damage to our system,” said Tami Zaun, spokesperson for Lake Country Power, which covers a huge swath of the Arrowhead region.
Zaun said crews restored power to thousands of households Monday before a second round of storms undid much of their progress. “So a lot of people that experienced an outage on the first first wave of the storms, they got hit again by the second wave,” Zaun said.
As of early Tuesday, more than 16,000 customers were without power in Minnesota. Most of those were in the northeast part of the state, where Lake Country Power alone was responding to outages affecting more than 8,000 customers.
By midday, the overall number of customers without power had dropped by a few thousand. But Lake Country Power said it could be at least two days before all its customers had power restored.
“The crews worked through the night last night hoping to make progress and completion from the first storm, but then a second storm set us back worse than the first one,” Derek Howe, chief operating officer for Lake Country Power, said in a news release Tuesday morning. “We will hit the outages at full strength once mutual aid is available but in the meantime our crews are working full force. Tonight we will have all crews rest after 11 p.m. for safety reasons as the three standby crews in each area respond to emergencies.”
The utility was responding to more than 200 individual outages.
Crews from neighboring utilities and cooperatives are helping to remove fallen trees and repair damaged power lines and poles.
“We really want the public to stay away if they see any downed lines,” stressed Zaun. “Please don’t try to help our crews. You just don’t know if that line is alive or if it’s dead.”
Other large outages were reported in parts of central and south-central Minnesota.
Storms on Monday night also dropped large hail on parts of the region — including hailstones larger than baseballs near Moorhead.
The damage assessment and cleanup Tuesday was taking place as a heat wave continued across the region.
Heat-index readings — combining air temperature and humidity — climbed to 106 in the Twin Cities on Monday, and 111 in New Ulm.
The heat and humidity was forecast to continue Tuesday — but not quite as intense as the previous day. Heat advisories remained in place Tuesday for the Twin Cities, Mankato, Albert Lea and Red Wing, where heat-index readings may reach 100 degrees.
Extreme heat warnings are in place for Rochester and Winona, where the heat index may climb above 100.
Find more forecast details on MPR Weather’s Updraft blog.
