Thursday’s ice storm left many local residents without power, some until Friday afternoon or even Saturday morning, and created a big mess for area electric providers.

Saturday, March 16, 2002

Thursday’s ice storm left many local residents without power, some until Friday afternoon or even Saturday morning, and created a big mess for area electric providers.

All three utilities serving southern Minnesota were affected, Alliant, Freeborn-Mower Cooperative Services and Xcel, with power outages affecting thousands of area customers. Although Albert Lea itself saw only scattered and temporary outages, communities north of the city, from Waseca to New Richland to Owatonna, experienced total blackouts.

New Richland was among the last communities in the area to be reconnected, with downed power lines and broken poles both north and south of town. Power was restored to most customers there soon after noon Friday.

A handful of other residents were still waiting for power on Saturday afternoon, in most cases because damage caused by the storm extended to their homes and had to be repaired by electricians before power could be reconnected.

According to Tim Thompson of Freeborn-Mower, the main problem in most outages was iced up lines that would break because of the extra weight.

&uot;Ice built up on the lines and the weight became a problem. The lines started ‘galloping’ and slapping together, causing the breakers to go out,&uot; said Thompson.

The extra weight of the ice means that the &uot;galloping&uot; motion will start with any kind of wind, and just kept going on, faster and faster, he explained.

There were also many broken power poles to deal with, which became a major operation for Xcel, according to company representative Ed Legge, since they had to repair some of their main transmission lines along with many of the smaller distribution lines.

&uot;We lost dozens of poles, and had to put up new ones in many locations,&uot; Legge said.

Alliant had reconnected power to most customers by Friday, but was left with a small number of rural locations north of Albert Lea where repairs were taking longer because the damage was so extensive, said company representatives. They were waiting for electricians to repair damage to the customers’ homes before finishing their part of the repairs. Alliant also had problems with both transmission and distribution lines.

On Friday morning, Freeborn-Mower was able to call in emergency line repair crews from Heartland Power and Hawkeye Tri-County Co-op in Iowa. This allowed them to keep their own crews working on downed lines and other malfunctioning equipment through the night on Thursday.

&uot;We’ll keep on working around the clock until everyone’s back up,&uot; said Thompson.

Xcel’s crews had to stop at 11 p.m. on Thursday, to get a chance to rest, but they resumed work at dawn on Friday. Alliant brought in extra crews from outside the area and worked around the clock to replace poles and downed lines.

As of Saturday afternoon, representatives of all three companies said that power had been restored to just about all of their customers throughout the area. Anyone still experiencing problems should contact their electric provider as soon as possible.