Minot Power Outage

If you were in Minot or the surrounding area last night there s a good chance you experienced a power outage The loss of power stemmed from a late evening incident and today crews were back at work cleaning up the damage Dan Erdmann KX News Beginning at 9 54pm equipment failure caused a fire in the control building at Verendrye Electric s bulk delivery substation serving the Minot area This caused an outage to 15 substations serving approximately 8600 consumers The majority of those affected were in Ward County 3100 customers were restored within 45 minutes and the remainder restored by 11 40 pm After the fire was out and the damages were assessed the substation was isolated and power re-routed to restore service to all customers Tom Meland with Central Power Electric Cooperative says even though the lights are back on there s still plenty of work to be done Tom Meland Central Power Electric Coop Today we re working on the Mallard Station trying to put in place that equipment that we can to shore up the Ruthville substation This is going to be a couple-day process probably until we re finished repairing everything here It s pretty complex and involved with a lot of cabling and wire work Dan Erdmann KX News Meland says they would not have been able regain power so fast without the efforts of numerous workers and businesses Tom Meland Central Power Electric Coop Appreciate the cooperation of Verendrye Electric our member switching around and getting the load restored as quickly as possible Xcel energy they helped us out here last night They own a lot of the equipment in here too and there s a lot of cable in it going back and forth as well as Otter Tail helped out in some of the outlying areas picked up some of our load Representatives say the substation will remain out of service while repairs are made and they expect the station to be back in service within a couple of days In the meantime they say the alternate power supply will provide adequate service while repairs are being made Meland estimates there was around 50 000 dollars worth of damage to the substation