Minnesota, USA, August 27, 2024. Strong thunderstorms rolled across parts of
Minnesota, including the Twin Cities early Tuesday. And tens of thousands of Minnesotans
remained without power in the wake of an earlier round of severe weather Monday night. Monday
night’s storms downed trees and power lines, dropped torrential rain and sparked
intense lightning as they moved from west-central Minnesota through the Twin Cities
and into western Wisconsin during the evening. The storms prompted officials at the Minnesota
State Fair to temporarily close parts of the grounds and cancel Monday night’s Grandstand
show. Monday’s Twins game at Target Field was also put in a weather delay. On Tuesday morning,
fair officials said they would delay opening the fairgrounds due to the morning’s storms, and
to assess damage and clean up debris. The gates usually open at 7 a.m. each day, there was no
immediate word on when they would open Tuesday. As Monday night’s storms exited the Twin Cities
metro area, the setting sun created rainbows and a vivid, surreal orange sky. Xcel Energy, Connexus
Energy, East Central Energy and other utilities reported combined power outages affecting more
than 100,000 customers in the immediate wake of the storms. More than 150,000 Minnesota
homes and businesses were without power as of 6:30 a.m. Tuesday — a combination of outages
remaining from the previous night and new ones sparked by the latest round of strong storms
that produced wind gusts in excess of 60 mph. The Tuesday morning storms also
produced torrential rainfall. Connexus Energy, which was responding to
significant power outages in the northern Twin Cities metro, said the multiple rounds
of severe weather caused more challenges for its repair crews. It called the damage in its
service area “unprecedented.” Please be patient. We expect this to take us all day and likely
into tomorrow, the utility said Tuesday morning.