Overhead electrical cables and a switch/fuse box caught fire near North Shore Bank Tuesday afternoon, causing a massive power outage that affected thousands of people.
Roughly 3,300 We Energies customers were affected by power outages starting at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. We Energies was able to restore power to all but 250 of those customers in the first 90 minutes, and hopes to restore power to another 50 customers by 10 p.m.
Two hundred customers are expected to be without power until tomorrow morning, according to Rick White from We Energies. The outage mostly affects apartment and condominium buildings on the east side of Oakland Avenue south of Capitol Drive.
Shorewood High School has been opened up as a cooling location for those affected by the heat.
We Energies is bringing in additional mobile generators to help restore power to some of those residents. We Energies has not yet determined why the switch/fuse unit and overhead electrical cables caught fire.
The power outage caused Shorewood Library to shut down early at 5:30 p.m., With temperatures in the 90s, the library was "rapidly warming" without air conditioning, according to a post on the library's Facebook page. The computers and Internet connection were also down as a result of the power outage.
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