If you live in northern Door County, you can blame a tree for potentially causing you to be late to work or, at the very least, fix your clocks this morning. Over 4,100 Wisconsin Public Service customers found themselves without power late Wednesday night after high winds entered the area, with more than 2,000 located in Sister Bay and Liberty Grove. The Washington Island Electric Cooperative posted just before 10 p.m. that even their customer would be without power because of a fallen tree on a transmission line from the American Transmission Line. That forced crews to shut down the Sister Bay and Egg Harbor substations, which help power the island. 

After shutting off the power in the early morning hours, WPS spokesperson Brendan Conway says the power was back for most residents by 2 a.m. to allow ATC to clean up and get everything up and running. A second outage impacted 27 WPS customers in Gardner, which was remedied after 5 a.m. on Thursday. WPS is still responding to outages across the state after the weekend storms. Conway says their lineworkers are dealing with some tough conditions due to the heavy ice buildup. 

After restoring power to more than 180,000 customers, WPS is still trying to get the lights on for approximately 2,400 customers in northern Wisconsin due to more than 1,600 reports of significant damage, including snapped utility poles and damaged electrical equipment.