Equipment failure cuts power to 4K in NE Minn.

by Dan Kraker, Minnesota Public Radio

Duluth, Minn. — Cook County in far northeastern Minnesota lost electricity for nearly two hours early Monday morning.

The outage occurred at about 6:30 a.m.

"A piece of equipment in one of our substations went bad," said Dave Wieben, director of operations for Arrowhead Electric Cooperative. "We had to figure out where that was, and then isolate that problem, and then get the line back on."

Power was restored at about 8:15 a.m. to the cooperative's roughly 4,000 customers. Grand Marais also lost power, but for a shorter amount of time.

The city-run public utility was able to fire up its backup generators to restore electricity.