Strong winds knock out power to hundreds

Electric company repair crews are busy tonight – trying to repair power lines knocked down by strong winds that started last night.

As of mid-afternoon, only 200 UPPCO customers were without power – down from about a thousand this morning.

The active weather making its way through the U.P. was spawned by the same storm that caused severe weather throughout the midwest over the weekend.

Winds in excess of 60 miles per hour were reported along the shoreline of Lake Superior.

“Obviously we had a pretty big storm move through the upper Great Lakes here over the last day and a half or so,” Matt Zika, a Meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Marquette said. “And we wouldn’t call some of these storms that we see in the fall ‘the gales of November’ if a lot of wind didn’t come along with them. And this storm is very typical of, maybe on the higher end of a typical gale type of event.”

Some areas east of Marquette are expected to pick up several inches of lake effect snow.

This could make travel a bit more difficult for some residents.

“With the wind blowing the snow around, obviously travel may be a little tricky in some places,” added Zika. “If people use their common sense and just slow down and take some time to get from place to place, everybody should be O.K.”

Temperatures are not expected to reach the 50’s again any time soon, but the weather should be calmer – but cold – through the middle part of this week.