ANTIGO — Much of Antigo’s north side commercial district lost power Friday afternoon after high winds snapped a tree south of Menards on Pioneer Rd., causing it to topple into a power line.
The tree fell around 12:30 p.m., when wind gusts reached around 40 mph, according to the National Weather Service.
Throughout the afternoon, the downed tree and live wires lay across the road, which was blocked off by units from the Town of Antigo Volunteer Fire Department.
“The wind blew the tree down onto the power lines, snapped the power line off, and then cut the power to — I’m guessing — the north half of town,” Alex Hafner, the department’s assistant chief, said at 2:30 p.m. “WPS is very busy right now. Usually, they’re on scene within the hour. But due to the high amount of calls today due to that wind that came through, they’re very busy.”
Nearly the entire afternoon, normally-bustling parking lots sat virtually empty but for vehicles driving in only to be signaled away by employees standing outside the darkened storefronts. For a period in the late afternoon, a lineup of northbound vehicles — many hauling boats and trailers for Memorial Day weekend — stretched from the dead traffic lights at the intersection of Highways 64 and 45 all the way to KFC.
Matt Cullen, a spokesman for Wisconsin Public Service (WPS), said the outage resulted in 1,200 customers on the north side losing power until around 4:30 p.m., when WPS workers arrived to Pioneer Rd. and restored power for much of the area.
“We’ve been able to actually reroute power around that damaged utility pole to be able to restore power to most of the customers who have been affected by that situation,” Cullen said at the time. “Just in the last few moments, it looks as though we have been able to reduce the number of customers that are affected by the outage to 27 customers there in the area.”
He estimated that power would likely be restored for the remaining 27 customers around 10 p.m.
“Just because of the damage to that pole, our crews need to be able to replace that pole first before they can restore power to those customers that remain affected, and we anticipate that that will happen later on this evening,” he said.
A vehicle was almost hit by the falling tree, according to Amber Buchberger, second assistant front end manager at Menards.
“A guest actually came in and said he was driving here and the tree landed right behind his truck,” Buchberger said. “He was driving and that’s when he heard a crack. He looked behind him and a tree had come down and almost got him.”
Because of the high volume of customers inquiring whether they were open, employees at the north side Kwik Trip stood outside with a sign reading, “No power, no gas, no food.”
“Everything is gone. There’s no gas, no power at all, no food, no water. We can’t do any register transactions, nothing,” said Assistant Store Leader Kyle Adamski around 3 p.m. “With this weekend, Memorial Day weekend, there’s a lot of people coming through, so we’ve been turning people away.”
“It’s a sale day and a holiday weekend,” said Grace Simpson, guest service leader at the Kwik Trip. “This is our busiest time of the day too. We had to turn a lot of people away and had a lot of people come to get gas. Multiple people said they planned on eating here, but they couldn’t. It helps with the south side being open, because that still leaves them somewhere to go, but we’re probably losing ‘X’ thousands of dollars for sure.”
Kyle and Ellen Disterhaft, owners of No Filter Nutrition, said the outage did not disrupt their business profoundly because of their portable card reader, which they also shared with the business next door.
“We run everything mainly off our phone, so even with the power out, having cellular signal, we’re still good,” Kyle said. “We go through SpotOn for our card reader service, but it’s linked to our phones through bluetooth, so as long as the phones are working, we can still link into cards, but then we just do the cash payback on our tills and everything. It balances out, because then we’ll just have more money on our credit account than we do on our cash account.”
Truck’s Place owner Ramone Aguilar estimated he lost around $4,000 because of the unexpected loss of power Friday afternoon, which waitress Juliana Bauknecht, standing in the dark, quiet restaurant surrounded by her coworkers, characterized as an exceptionally unusual workday.
“We’ve never lost power mid-day,” Bauknecht said. “Usually, it’s a couple hours at the end of the night, but then power comes on within an hour, so this is excessive by all means.”
Most Popular
Comments / 0