Undated - Many Upper Peninsula Power Company customers woke up this Halloween morning to more than just scary weather – about 1800 were left without power.
The heart of the outage was the Gwinn and Sawyer area, where almost 1600 UPPCO customers were in the dark in the early morning hours, including the Gwinn area community schools. The schools closed today due to the outage.
UPPCO reported smaller-scale multi-customer outages in Little Lake, Toivola, Twin Lakes, Skandia, Chatham and L’anse throughout the morning as well.
UPPCO says crews working to restore power have been challenged by high winds and snow. As of 8:30 am, 98% of customers in the Gwinn area had their service restored.
The utility company warns of intermittent outages throughout the day due to continued windy conditions. They recommend staying away from power lines for safety.
The UPPCO service area serves about 52,000 customers across the Upper Peninsula.
-- story written by Louis Justman. Updates by Hans Ahlstrom
