Crews work hard to get the lights back on
DAFTER — Many people in the eastern U.P. had a dark Christmas, but thanks to the tireless work of crews at the Cloverland Electric Cooperative, most of the power outages have been addressed.
High winds and bad weather knocked trees onto power lines, pulled those lines down, and broke poles. Cloverland has 42 substations with around ten lines coming from each.
“That just made for a tremendous amount of outages that take a long time to get back up. It’s not like I can fix this one thing and all of a sudden 5,000 people come back on. It’s more like, I’ve got 200 people on this line and 500 people on that line, just up and down and you just have to go out and get it done,” said Dan Dasho, President and CEO of the electric provider.
Cloverland got the lights back on for most members, and it took a lot of hard work to do it.
“What you have to do is actually go up and down the lines inspecting them to say, ‘okay, this line has three trees on it, it goes on for six miles, and we’ve got to get three trees off of it before we can even energize it to see that it is working,'” added Dasho, “And I couldn’t be any prouder of our people out there, because, like you say, they’re putting in all this time when it would be great if they could spend it with their family.”
The Co-op ended up adding six additional crews to handle the work load. Cleanup will continue for the rest of the week.
[Photo courtesy Cloverland Electric Cooperative]