It was almost lights out for the Washington County Fair this year.
The fairgrounds, located in Baytown Township, lost power at 11:17 p.m. during severe weather on Monday night. With the fair set to open at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning, crews scrambled to come up with a plan, said Fair Manager Doris Ostertag.
“What’s the level above stressed? That’s what I was,” she said.
Fair officials brought in generators to run lights and operate a well so the fairgrounds would have water, she said.
“That’s all we were doing yesterday, running around,” she said. “We lost our setup time.”
Fortunately, crews from Xcel Energy, which had originally predicted power could be out until 5:15 p.m. Thursday, were able to restore electric service around 11:45 p.m. Tuesday, just 7 hours and 15 minutes before the gates opened.
“We all wrote it down in our books (for 2025) because we’ve never had that happen before,” Ostertag said.
Back-to-back storms earlier this week brought lightning, heavy rain, hail and winds up to 65 mph to the area, damaging electric infrastructure and causing outages for about 300,000 customers across Minnesota, primarily in the Twin Cities metro and western Wisconsin, according to Xcel officials.
Crews on Wednesday were working to restore power to the remaining 3,000 customers, primarily in the east metro, and hoped to have them back online by Wednesday night.
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