Chelsea Bossert/Daily Mining Gazette Locations throughout the area were without electricity Monday evening, including the Portage Lake District Library. Heavy rain and high winds were blamed for the outages.

HOUGHTON — A major storm event hit the Copper Country Monday evening, causing several blackouts in the region.

According to Power Outage maps as of 2 p.m. Tuesday, Ontonagon County had been hit the hardest. At press time Tuesday, the county reported 830 UPPCO customers without power and 140 REA customers — over 30 percent of the region. Houghton County followed with 560 without. Baraga has 90 with UPPCO and 88 with REA. No further counties have been affected.

Manager of Communications and External Affairs Dan Freeborn said UPPCO was still working Tuesday to fix any issues.

“UPPCO crews worked through the night to assess damage and restore power after yesterday’s storm,” he said. “Broken poles are major projects that each take several hours to complete. Crews have been assigned to these areas in Ontonagon and Houghton Counties. We expect many of the remaining outages to last through [Tuesday] afternoon and some into the evening hours.”

The majority of outages in Houghton County were near Chassell, Portage Entry, Alston and Nisula. Freeborn added thew heat advisory Tuesday is also affecting operations and asked customers for patience. “We understand long outages, especially during hot weather, are difficult and we appreciate our customers’ understanding as we work to restore power as quickly and safely as possible,” he said.

Houghton Police Chief John Donnelly said the outage had minimal effect on police operations in the city, however it was still a worry. “We had a lot of power outages and traffic lights out. At the same time, we had our officers handling house calls and damages to trees falling,” he said.

Donnelly said if a traffic light is out, it is supposed to be a treated like a four-way stop.

“Everybody’s supposed to stop and you’re supposed to give right of way to whoever came first,” he said. Every once in a while, you get somebody that just tried to blow through that. Fortunately, we didn’t have any wrecks [Monday].”

ListenUP Radio, who operates several radio stations in Houghton including WOLV 97.7 FM and WHKB 102.3 FM, had little pause in transmission due to their backup generator, Operations Manager Kevin Ericson said.

“Once the power went out, we were able to get the stations recovered,” he said. “And for the most part there was very little down time. We have battery backups and the generator can literally go for seven, eight hours at a time.”

UPPCO’s Freeborn said the utility is asking customers to report any outages they are experiencing by calling UPPCO Customer Service Center at (906) 449-2011 or through its online portal at uppco.com. If you encounter a downed power line, call 911 immediately.