The National Weather Service confirmed multiple tornadoes formed in Dodge County, Wisconsin, on May 15, including one that led to a full system outage for Wisconsin public power utility Juneau Utilities around 4:30 p.m. that day.
Transmission lines feeding Juneau’s three substations were impacted, leaving more than 1,200 households without power.
The tornado caused nine broken poles, six distribution poles that could be salvaged and straightened, and impacted 22 transmission poles, some of which had distribution under-build on them, Municipal Electric Utilities of Wisconsin reported.
A retirement facility, various small businesses, residential homes, apartments, and farms were significantly damaged or destroyed.
The MEUW team coordinated two waves of mutual aid crews from Columbus, Hartford, Hustisford, Jefferson, Kaukauna, Manitowoc, Waterloo, Waunakee, and Waupun.
Thirty-nine municipal utility workers from those nine MEUW communities worked alongside the Juneau crews, restoring power to 90% of customers by midnight, to everyone within 24 hours.
