ASHWAUBENON (NBC 26) — Wisconsin Public Service is working to bring power back to thousands of customers affected by power outages from thunderstorms Monday night and Tuesday.
- Meet one woman who had a tree branch fall in her driveway during high speed winds Tuesday
- Wisconsin Public Service says they are working around the clock to restore power with all available crews
- See the WPS outage map here
(The following is a transcription of the full broadcast story.)
Thunderstorms tore through the Green Bay area Tuesday. I'm Pari Apostolakos at Wisconsin Public Service. They tell me how they're dealing with the outages across our neighborhoods.
"My dogs get a little freaked out, but more so my little girl is scared of storms," Roleen Kralovez said outside her house on Tuesday.
The power at Kralovez's home went out during Tuesday's thunderstorms.
"I actually heard a couple really big bangs and I wasn't sure if I heard sparks or if a transformer went," she said. "But, [I saw] a lot of light."
A branch from her neighbor's yard came down onto her driveway. She says a crew was there and restored power within an hour of the outage.
"Our crews have been able to make progress, [as of about 1:30 p.m. Tuesday] they've restored power to more than 18,000 customers who have been affected by those storms since they first began to move in on Monday evening," Wisconsin Public Service spokesperson Matt Cullen said.
"We do expect that for customers who were affected by that first round of storms that began late Monday night that they will have power restored or a crew assigned to their outage by late this afternoon," Cullen said at their training facility. He said people impacted by severe storms Tuesday should have a crew assigned to their outage before late Wednesday morning.
Cullen said damaging winds and lightning strikes have caused most of the damage which has led to power outages in northeast and north central Wisconsin.
Kralovez has lived in her current home for eight years. She says she hasn't seen a whole tree fall down on a power line.
"I lose branches like the one in my driveway there ... That are like the size of a tree, a small tree, so they're hard to haul around. But nothing where a whole tree went down yet," she said.
Wisconsin Public Service says to stay at least 25 feet away from downed power lines and always assume they are energized.
