Rain and up to 60 mph winds on Saturday and Sunday took out trees, downed power lines and left thousands of Southeastern Wisconsin residents in the dark.
Tom Leahy lives in Elm Grove and lost his power Saturday afternoon.
“We don’t have any water. We have a pump, you know, a well, and we can’t flush the toilets. We can’t wash our hands,” said Leahy. “[My wife’s] gone to the gym today to take a shower.”
Leahy has lived in his home for 35 years and says it’s rare for the power to be out longer than a few hours. This weekend he was without electricity for over two days. He’s had to sit in his car to charge his phone and throw away most of the food in his fridge.
“Fortunately I’m retired and I can worry about these things,” Leahy said.
Others affected by this weekend’s outages were left scrambling to make accommodations. On Monday, hundreds of parents were forced to find childcare for their kids after a Menomonee Falls school without power had to close for the day.
“I’d been communicating with the parents over the weekend, as well as trying to determine whether or not we were able to have school here today and had to cancel that at 5:30 this morning,” said Peter Lorenz, Principal of Zion Lutheran School.
In total, nearly 85,000 people lost power. We Energies brought in crews from Whitewater and Lomira to help bring back service on Monday.
Brendan Conway, a spokesperson for We Energies, said the damage crews ran into was severe.
“Power poles have been snapped, powerlines have been taken down by large trees, in some cases we need to rebuild that entire circuit the power circuit,” said Conway. “That said, our crews are used to it. They’re not going to give up and I will say we appreciate greatly our customers’ patience. Hopefully, they just know this has been nonstop work.”
Conway says all power should be restored to customers by Monday night.
