Photo: Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash.com

By Laura Durenberger-Grunow - Boreal Community Media - January 23, 2025


The City of Grand Marais has issued a third update regarding the power outage that affected public utility customers on January 19. 

During the recent cold snap, which brought actual temperatures of -20s F to -30s F to much of the area, Grand Marais Public Utility customers lost power on Sunday morning (with the exception of downtown and a few isolated residents). The affected area spanned from Croftville on the east side of town to Fall River Falls on the west side. A large portion of residents regained power by early afternoon; however, power was not restored to the west side until around 9 pm that evening. 

In response to the outage and cold temperatures, Cook County Public Health and Human Services (PHHS) announced that staff would be on standby for anyone needing an emergency warming shelter. As of Monday morning, county officials told Boreal Community Media that no requests had been made, and therefore, a shelter had not been opened. PHHS would remain on standby to open a shelter if extremely cold temperatures and prolonged loss of power would occur again. 

In an email and on Facebook, the city initially reported that the outage was due to "excessive load on the system" and asked residents to "limit their power use within reasonable limits where possible," including "turning off unnecessary lights and appliances," to help prevent additional outages. The statement went on to say that taking these steps could help "stabilize the system." 

On Monday, January 20, the city issued a second update via email and Facebook stating that power had been officially restored for all public utility customers. The cause of the outage was reported to be "a faulted elbow connection in a junction box, which caused the outage."

Around 4:30 pm on January 22, the city issued a third update regarding the outage. The release, which was posted on Facebook, reported that the outage was due to "a fault in an underground cable connection on the west end of Grand Marais" and that "while identifying the exact location of the fault took some time, our team quickly restored power once the issue was pinpointed."

Additionally, the city mentioned two improvements it is exploring to reduce the impact of power outages in the future: balancing the load and updating infrastructure. 

To improve grid reliability and minimize the impact of future power outages, city officials are looking into ways to distribute electricity demand more evenly across the system, which will reduce the number of customers affected by individual circuit failures, according to the release. Additionally, they are considering replacing certain junction boxes with advanced sectionalizing cabinets, which will "isolate smaller sections of the system during repairs, minimizing disruptions." 

While the city does currently have a backup generator in place for power outages, City of Grand Marais Communications Director Patrick Knight told Boreal Community Media, "Our backup generators are designed to provide power to all city power customers as a substitute for power received through the transmission lines from Great River Energy during an outage of those lines. However, if our local distribution system experiences an outage due to a fault in the line, the generators cannot supply power directly to those affected areas."

The city plans to provide updates on the projects as they develop. "Our priority is to provide reliable and efficient electricity service to our community," it said in the release.