Dave Asproth looks at the floorboards that have come up following a pipe that burst in house. The pipe froze during the recent power outage and Asproth, who is mostly wheel chair bound, spent all night using a shop vac to get the water off of his floor.
When the power first went out on Sunday, January 7, Dave Asproth didn’t panic.
“I waited for about an hour, until about 4 p.m. to call the Sheriff ’s Office and ask them when the power was going to get turned back on. They told me they didn’t know. A line crew was looking for the break, but hadn’t found it yet,” said Asproth, who lost the lower portion of his right leg from diabetes a few years ago and is, for the most part, wheelchair bound.
Asproth, a former Hedstrom’s Lumber employee, noted trapper, fisherman and world class fly-tyer, lives with a bobtailed cat named Hilda in a small home about two miles east of Grand Marais. The house is located about one quarter of a mile on the upper side of Highway 61. His home is tucked in the woods surrounded by nature. Five deer were in his front yard peacefully milling about on Tuesday, Jan. 16. Wolves, coyotes, bobcats, moose, fox, birds of all feather, and of course deer, all visit his neighborhood, and Asproth loves seeing them all.
A significant portion of Grand Marais and Croftville was left in the dark due to a power outage that occurred that Sunday. The outage occurred between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., and power was restored around 2:30 a.m.
In between, an emergency shelter was established at the Cook County Senior Center for those who had lost heat to their homes, as well as to those who might need other types of assistance in the wake of the loss of electricity.
Emergency instructions were sent via Boreal and by phone on a recorded message to those affected by the power outage.
By 9 p.m. Asproth, whose house was without heat or any light except for the flashlight he held, had had enough and he called the Sheriff ’s Office and asked for assistance to get to the Senior Center.
“It’s lucky my cell phone worked. My land line wouldn’t work at all,” he said.
Asproth, who doesn’t drive anymore, was getting cold and needed help.
“I told the dispatcher that I needed a ride to the Senior Center to wait it out there. But no one showed up. No one came at all,” he said sadly.
Meanwhile, after his house had been without heat or power for about 10 hours one of his pipes in the front of his house broke and water started spilling down a wall onto his floor.
“When the power came on I used my shop vac to get the water off of the floor. I stayed up all night running the shop vac from my wheelchair, sucking four or five gallons of water from my floor,” he said.
Dave called his brother who lives in Duluth to ask for help and his brother showed up early the next day.
“He put a plug in the pipe and found out where it was leaking,” said Dave.
Meanwhile the wet floor boards were coming up in the kitchen/living area. Dave said if he had needed to leave his house, he couldn’t have used his wheelchair to get out of the front door because the boards were too high and would have stopped his chair.
“I will have to have the entire floor redone,” he said. “But not now. I am going to wait until it’s warm outside. When the work is done, I will have to move out of here to a place that has a handicapped accessible shower and is set up for wheelchairs. Should only (the work) take a couple of days,” he added.
Meanwhile the floor boards that haven’t pulled up, the ones lying flat, are mushy to walk on, sort of like walking across a bog.
Asproth worries about mold, but as he stated, with the cold and snow, this is no time to leave the house he built with his own hands. Something could happen again, he said, and he wants to be around to catch any problem before it gets too bad.
Insurance will cover the work to fix his house. An employee from Cook County Social Services, Lynn Wright, came and helped Dave and Gayle Anderson, a friend, brought over a dehumidifier so he could dry the place out.
When contacted, Cook County Sheriff Pat Eliasen said the matter is under investigation.
As for the power outage, at first line crews believed they were looking for an underground break in the line, but it was discovered that a power pole located by the Little League field had been accidentally struck by a private plow truck, and that had caused the interruption.
As for Dave, he’s taking care of his diabetes, taking multiple shots each day and watching his diet and watching movies on his old TV set that crackles and squawks when it’s on. He tie flies some, when the mood hits, and in the meantime he and Hilda look out the windows at the wildlife that passes by.
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