City Administrator addresses recent Grand Marais power outage cause and concerns

On Sunday, Jan. 19, many Grand Marais residents experienced a power outage amid an extreme cold warning, with temperatures reaching negative 20 degrees.

Around 9:30 a.m., residents in isolated areas of the city, including Creechville, along Croftville Rd, and west of town along Hwy 61, lost power, and, for those without a wood stove or generator, also lost heat.

“We had 500 meters that were out of power,” City Administrator Mike Roth said. “That’s just over 40% of our system.”

Roth said the initial cause of the power outage was unknown. As city public utility crews worked to identify the issue and restore power, Roth said the first observation was “that the load on the system had been extremely high, as high as we’ve seen it.”

City crews then began working to shift some of the load off the circuit. The result restored power to a significant number of Grand Marais residents at approximately 10:30 a.m. “So we went from 500 to about 85 meters that were actually affected by the outage,” Roth said.

Shortly thereafter, the City of Grand Marais stated in a Facebook post that the cause of the power outage was due to an “excessive load on the system” and asked the public to limit their power use within reasonable limits to help stabilize the system and prevent further outages.

After further examination, however, Roth said city crews and Arrowhead Electric lineman discovered “a connector called an elbow that’s in a junction box that was burned out and was short-circuiting.”

The short circuit prevented the remaining 85 Grand Marais residents from regaining power. Roth said there is no evidence to determine whether the short-circuiting was driven by cold temperatures or a random malfunction incident.

The city’s Facebook statement on Sunday about the initial cause of the power outage, an excessive load on the system, created some confusion among utility customers and the public. The public raised questions on Facebook about capacity issues and how future housing and commercial development might strain the electrical system.  

As for capacity issues, Roth said the city’s power plant can produce six megawatts and has “plenty of extra capacity to add load to our system.” On average, the city experiences peak use in the winter but typically hovers around five megawatts. “We have never actually used six megawatts at any one time in the city,” he said.

“So we know that we can be reasonably assured that we can always have those six megawatts of power in town,” Roth said. “And we’d have to grow quite a bit for that to become a limiting factor for us.”

With the anticipated opening of the Gunflint Vue apartments this spring and, in the coming years, additional housing and commercial developments within city limits, Roth said the city currently has the capacity in the system. “We don’t have any concerns about adding load to the system, but we are thinking about as new load comes on the system, that it is balanced correctly.”

As for preventative measures moving forward, Roth said the city infrastructure, including connections and transformers, is checked on a regular schedule to ensure equipment is working correctly. “So I don’t know that there is any more preventative maintenance or measurements that we want to do.”

Sunday’s power outage highlighted a few areas for improvement within city infrastructure and communication protocols, Roth said. “We debriefed about the outage afterward with all of our staff involved and talked about ways that we can communicate with each other better and that we could get better information out to the public.”

Roth said city staff also talked about “things that we might want to do differently to try and address the issues that we were concerned about at the time.”

The identified areas for improvement include changing and upgrading the electrical system to increase the number of circuits that the city uses and decrease the number of customers connected to each circuit. This change will lessen the number of residents impacted in the event of a short-circuiting incident resulting in the loss of power.

“Some of these things directly address the issue that occurred on Sunday,” Roth said. “And some of them are just addressing the conversations we had about what might have been the problem.”

Roth said in the coming months, the City Public Utility Commission will begin discussing investing in engineering plans to divide the circuits and potentially add more to the system.

Another area for improvement is communication with the public during an emergency event, something the city intends to address in the coming weeks. Roth said the city’s protocol for communication depends on “how many people are affected.”

In an isolated power outage affecting a small number of utility customers, the city will try to contact residents individually on site. During a widespread power outage affecting a larger number of residents, the city will use Facebook or community-wide communications, which is the method the city used on Jan. 19.

“We didn’t have a really good estimate of when the power would come back on because we didn’t know what the problem was yet,” Roth said. “So the initial communication that came out in the morning was just to let people know there’s an outage and what our concerns were.”

Roth said the city will implement a tool called TextMyGov in the coming weeks to improve communication with impacted utility customers and have a direct line to the public. ” This is a way for us to get the word out to folks directly.”

The Grand Marais City Council approved using the communication platform during the Nov. 26, 2024 meeting.

While many Grand Marais residents endured loss of power and heat on Jan. 19, they weren’t the only ones battling the extremely negative temperatures. The city utility crews and Arrowhead Electic lineman worked outside on Sunday to restore power to residents.

“Our line workers are incredibly dedicated,” Roth said. “We’re very fortunate to have guys like that that are willing to step up and help out.”

WTIP’s Kalli Hawkins sat down with City Administrator Mike Roth to discuss the Jan. 19 power outage, including the cause, how cold weather impacts infrastructure, areas for improvement, lessons learned, capacity issues, and more. The audio from the interview is below.

Kalli Hawkins January 24, 2025