Thousands up north spending 3rd day without power amid heavy snowfall
BRAHAM, Minn. -- About an hour north of the Twin Cities, people continue to be without power. For some, it's been that way for nearly three days.
"First day was maybe three or four hours of outage. The next day was literally all day," said Christi Brainard.
And just when Brainard thought the worst was behind her, her power went out again on Friday morning.
"Our temperature inside our house went down to just under 60 degrees too. So it's starting to get pretty cold," Brainard said.
She is one of more than 12,000 homeowners in Kanabec County and the surrounding area who've experienced outages. East Central Energy, out of Braham, had that number down to 5,000 Friday morning.
"Unfortunately those outages are largely individual so they are going to take some time," said Justin Jahnz, of East Central Energy.
Jahnz said heavy, wet snow is to blame for the outages. It weighs on branches, which in turn break off and fall onto power lines.
Normally, they'll use 40 linemen after a storm like this but that number has doubled to 80 as they work against the clock to restore power before frigid temperatures arrive. They know they're not out of the woods yet, because the woods are the problem. Linemen have to trudge through deep snow to get to downed lines.
"The density is an issue up here and when we have outages, all that line creates a lot more work to repair," Jahnz said.
"It gets a little chilly but we'll get through it," said Tony Anderson.
Anderson lives in the country and he's going out of his way to improvise while he waits for power to be restored.
"The worst thing is we have to take snow into the house and melt it for water because we have our own well here so when the power goes out we don't have any water," he said. "It's beautiful out here, absolutely gorgeous, but it has downfalls too."
East Central Energy believes they'll likely go into Saturday with their power restoration efforts.
In some parts of the state it could take longer to restore power, potentially Monday, and linemen from Kansas City will be coming to Minnesota to help.