Safety note: Stay away from downed lines, which may be tangled in storm debris. You can report outages or downed lines to MG&E at (608) 252-7111 or 1-800-245-1123.
Thousands of Madison residents are still without power after Tuesday night’s severe storm that downed hundreds of trees and power lines across the city — and some might not have it restored until Friday or later.
It's taking so long to restore power because of how widespread the outages and damage were from the storm — likely the worst such event in the area in nearly 50 years, according to a utility spokesman.
Madison Gas and Electric crews have been working around the clock to restore service to the nearly 46,000 MG&E customers who have lost power since Tuesday night, calling in for help from crews from four different states, according to a press release from the utility company. As of Thursday afternoon, more than 90% of customers impacted by the storm had their power restored.
Still, about 5,000 MG&E customers are still without service, and hundreds of Alliant Energy customers in southern and central Wisconsin are also still without power. About 37,000 Alliant customers experienced outages after the storm. Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission estimated that number could be closer to 10,000 homes.
“Due to the hundreds of individual outage incidents and complexity of some of the restoration work, some electric customers may still be without service for multiple days,” reads a Thursday afternoon update from MG&E. “Impacted customers should continue to plan to be without power for multiple days. We currently do not have an estimated restoration time for those customers who remain without service.”
Scattered storms and gusty winds are forecasted for Friday, which could further complicate the utility company’s response.
For some, like Forrest Van Schwartz, who lives in the Park Ridge neighborhood on the far west side, days without power and few updates from MG&E have led to worst-case-scenario thinking.
Van Schwartz has been without power since 8:25 p.m. Tuesday. He told the Cap Times he has tried to contact MG&E for an update on when it might be restored about 100 times to no avail.
Van Schwartz is the president of the Park Ridge homeowners association and said most of the 125 homes in his neighborhood are in the same boat.
“People out here are starting to panic,” Van Schwartz said. “We've got young people with new babies that can't heat formula. We've got older people who don't have cell phones and the landlines are all out of commission. If they were to have a health emergency, they have no way to call for help.”
He finally got through to the state Public Service Commission late Thursday morning. The PSC informed him power might not be back until Friday night. Even that seemed like “guesswork” to Van Schwartz, he said.
“We’re in the dark, in more ways than one,” Van Schwartz said. “That's the only way to describe it.”
Tuesday night’s thunderstorm and tornado warnings brought hurricane-force winds that downed trees across the city, blocked off nearly a hundred roads, and damaged cars and homes in the aftermath, according to the city’s street division.
Roughly 150 streets in Madison were mostly or completely blocked due to the storm, and the city received seven reports of trees that fell onto homes, according to a Wednesday afternoon city update. At that time, there were approximately 400 reports of damage of varying priorities that required city response. And that number has only grown as “hundreds more reports are still being sorted and triaged, and more calls and messages continue to be received.”
If residents have damage from public trees to report, they can do so with a form at www.cityofmadison.com/ReportAProblem, and crews will respond as soon as possible, according to the city.
Tuesday’s storm wreaked havoc, causing Madison schools to close Wednesday due to “unsafe conditions” and chunks of the city remained without electricity more than 12 hours after the storm hit.
And while most of the debris has since been cleared — residents can now set out any branches or brush to be picked up— power restoration remains an issue. This is the largest widespread power outage in this service area in recent history, likely seen since the Great Ice Storm of 1976, MG&E spokesperson Steve Schultz said.
“Crews continue to target the outages/incidents impacting the largest number of customers first to safely restore as many customers as possible as quickly as possible,” a statement from MG&E said, adding that the biggest challenge continues to be the high volume of broken poles and downed lines, which can take a full workday to repair. Crews were concentrating Thursday on that work, the majority of which is on the west side of Madison.
“With widespread damage, crews will continue damage assessment efforts throughout the day,” the statement says.
Allison Garfield joined the Cap Times in 2021 and covers local government. She graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in journalism and previously worked as a government watchdog reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin and was the state capitol intern for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Support Allison's work and local journalism by becoming a Cap Times member. Follow her on Twitter @aligarfield_.
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