Work underway to restore power to several northwoods Wisconsin communities

Crews from Wisconsin Public Service have been working to restore power to thousands of people affected by strong storms Monday night. Electricity has been mostly restored in Oshkosh, but now workers are turning their attention to heavily wooded areas of northern Wisconsin.

At one point nearly 13-thousand people lost power in heavy storms and strong winds. Now the most serious outages are in Wabeno, Eagle River, Rhinelander and Minocqua.

Lisa Prunty is a spokeswoman for WPS. She says the timing of the storms has been an issue…because they’re coincided with bad weather in other states. “We did have crews who volunteered to come in off their vacation,” she says. “Unfortunately we don’t have contractor crews that we usually work with because they’re in Ohio and in Illinois helping restore the hundreds and thousands of people out there. We’re hoping if we don’t get additional storms today or high winds we could have everyone online by early tomorrow morning.”

Prunty says some power poles were snapped and lines are tangled in trees. She warns power customers not to go near lines, which may be live. WPS’ website has information on keeping food cool in refrigerators and freezers.