Tri-County Electric Cooperative (TEC) crews worked overnight to get power back to members who suffered outages at the hands of Mother Nature during yesterday’s storm. As of 9:30 a.m. Monday, about 16 members continue to be without power.
At its peak, the co-op had about 4,500 members without power. A total of eight substations were out due to damage to Dairyland Power Cooperative’s transmission lines that feed power into the substations. Those substations included: Cherry Grove, Fountain, Granger, Henrytown, Lewiston, Peterson, Spring Valley and Stockton.
Power to the substations was restored at about 6:30 p.m. At that time, TEC had about 500 members without power. Crews concentrated on power line problems in isolated areas of its service territory. One area in Fillmore County was west of Harmony and north of Granger. Another targeted spot was a line south of the Valley High Addition and west of Hokah in Houston County. Power to most individuals was restored early this morning around 3 a.m. About 16 members still are without power. Some of those members are serviced south of Greenleafton which is attached to a Dairyland transmission line that lost about 30 poles. TEC crews are working to get the remainder of the system back online by late afternoon or evening.
“I’d like to thank the membership for their patience as our crews continue to work to get those last individuals back online,” said Chad Chaffee, TEC’s vice president of operations. “We have a dedicated group of guys who have been working hard to get the power back on.”
Chaffee says this is the co-ops’s most significant power outage since the flooding of 2007. The cooperative has about 40 broken poles.
TEC urges members and the public to take caution near downed power lines and broken poles.
“Once we have everyone online, crews will focus on the cleanup process and be removing damaged line and poles,” said Chaffee. “Cleanup of the system could take several weeks.”
Tri-County Electric Cooperative is a member-owned electric distribution cooperative serving three counties in Minnesota including Winona, Houston and Fillmore and parts of Olmsted and Mower counties in Minnesota and Howard, Winneshiek and Allamakee counties in Iowa. It provides electricity to more than 12,800 services in the area. TEC is a Touchstone Energy Cooperative.
