Car accident causes brief outages

Posted on March 2, 2011

Rockford, Minn. (March 2, 2011) — A car accident that occurred at 7 p.m. on March 1 caused 2,300 of Wright-Hennepin’s members to lose power.

The car hit a major transmission line causing both Howard Lake and Highland substations to lose power. The outage affected Albion, Chatham, Middleville, Marysville, Cokato, Victor, Stockholm and Woodland townships. In spite of the sub-zero temperatures, the Highland substation was back online in 30 minutes, and power was restored to the Howard Lake substation 25 minutes later. All 2,300 affected members had their power restored within one hour of the accident.

WH keeps members informed of the latest power outage information through a real-time power outage map at wh-oms.whe.org/Outages, its Facebook page at facebook.com/WrightHennepin, and its Twitter profile at twitter.com/Wright_Hennepin.

WH is a member-owned non-profit electric utility that provides electric power to Wright County and the western part of Hennepin County. The cooperative has been a corporate citizen in this area since 1937 and currently serves more than 46,000 electric accounts. The utility started its security division in 1989 that provides local home security solutions as well as monitors alarm systems for more than 50,000 customers in 32 states and three Canadian provinces.