Many residents and businesses in Grand Marais were left in the dark on Thursday, July 19 when the power suddenly went out at about 9:30 p.m.
According to Grand Marais Communications Director Patrick Knight, the outage, which affected the whole downtown area, was caused by a fault in a primary underground wire.
With the power out to the street light on Highway 61, the Cook County Sheriff ’s Department sent a couple of deputies in squad cars to keep traffic moving in a safe manner until power was restored to the light.
Knight said city staff responded to a report of damage to a transformer near Highway 61 and Broadway. Four city staff members made repairs to the transformer and attempted to turn on the circuit, which failed.
After the initial attempt to restart the circuit was unsuccessful, the staff tested each of the nine sections of the downtown circuit, powering each circuit up one at a time from 11 p.m. until 3 a.m. Electricity, however, was rebooted to many homes by 11:30 p.m.
Meanwhile, one storeowner was at her store until 3 a.m. before she felt comfortable leaving freezers and refrigerators that had been shut down by the outage.
As for the city PUC, they had a long night as well as an early morning to find the cause of the outage.
The fault was found the next day after only partial power was restored to some three-phase customers.
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