Over 5,000 remain without power in Madison's largest outage in decades (2024)

The severe thunderstorms and strong winds that swept through the Madison area Tuesday night caused the most widespread power outages the region has seen since the Great Ice Storm of 1976, Madison Gas and Electric spokesperson Steve Schultz said.

More than 46,000 MGE customers lost power during the storm — close to double the number affected by a similar event in June 2022 — in roughly 500 separate outage incidents. That’s the largest number of individual incidents MGE has experienced at one time, surpassing the approximately 300 incidents reported in 2022.

There were still 5,235 customers without power as of 9:42 a.m. Thursday, according to the MGE website.

About 37,000 Alliant Energy customers in southern and central Wisconsin also experienced outages, said Tony Palese, an Alliant spokesperson. As of 9:38 a.m. Thursday, 1,027 customers in Wisconsin still were without power, including 787 in Dane County, the Alliant website showed.

It could take several days for power to be restored to some MGE customers. A small number of Alliant customers may also experience multi-day outages, but the utility expected to have most of its customers in Wisconsin back in service by Wednesday evening, Palese said.

“One of the challenges,” Palese said, is that “a lot of these are small, individual outages affecting a handful of customers, so it’s certainly going to take some time in getting out there.”

Straight-line winds knocked trees and branches onto power lines and took out utility poles in and around Madison. MGE has received at least 20 reports of damaged poles that will need to be repaired or replaced, which can take most of a day for a single pole, Schultz said.

About one-third of Vanguard Electric’s customers in Black Earth also lost power because of the storm. The utility has already made the necessary repairs, which included bracing or removing some broken poles, and it will replace those poles over the next couple of weeks, Vanguard Superintendent Kurt Meier said.

Power grid operator ATC experienced outages at seven facilities, including four power lines in southern Wisconsin: one between Blanchardville and Mount Horeb, one between Mount Horeb and Verona, one in Sun Prairie and one between DeForest and Portage, according to Jody Lau, an ATC spokesperson. Power has since been restored at all of the affected facilities. Repairs to damaged poles will continue over the next few days but will not affect ATC’s ability to deliver power to customers, Lau said.

Damage assessment crews are still investigating the causes and extent of the damage for both MGE and Alliant, a process that could extend into Thursday morning. At this point, Schultz said, it’s hard to say how long the outages will last or which areas will remain in the dark the longest. The impacts in Madison were widespread but appear to be most significant on the Far West Side.

“Our crews are out there,” Schultz said. “We’re working around the clock to get get everybody back as safely and as quickly as we can.”