HOUGHTON - About 1,500 Upper Peninsula Power Co. customers in Houghton County were without power for several hours this morning.
"The outage started around 5:30 a.m. and by about 8 a.m. we had the majority of our customers back on," said Jay Ringler, customer service manager from the Houghton UPPCO office, shortly after 9 this morning.
"We still have scattered outages," he added. "We do have crews working on each of the individual outages; we don't expect restoration to take very long."
UPPCO identified lightning from the strong storm system that worked its way through the Copper Country Wednesday night and this morning as the cause for the outage.
"Lightning took out different areas of our service territory, including a substation feeder," Ringler said.
That feeder was re-energized to restore power to most customers.
According to UPPCO's updated outage information website (uppco.com/outagesummary), 1,491 of UPPCO's 52,000 customers were affected at 7:45 this morning, including 1,365 in Houghton County. The number dropped to 268 by 8:15.