~7/18/15: Anyone else get some severe thunderstorms from last night? We sure did! Thankfully, very little to no damage occurred where I'm at. Also, the reclosers on my neighborhood line did there job so there were no long term outages. However, friends in WI (same area where my "homemade" power poles are at) were not so lucky. There were reports of tornado like winds from last nights storm, which did lead to dozens of downed trees and part of my friends roof completely gone (Fortunately, everyone was fine, no injuries).

For my property in area, we only had a handful of downed trees. To my surprise, a number of trees and branches fell every which way and completely missed my poles. Some braches did actually get "lucky" and damaged some poles though (One pole fell over because a large branch caused the base to break, a cross arm ripped off another pole and leaving the pole top split, and one last pole were the wires got pulled off).

Side Note: According to Xcel, they stated around 240,000 customers in both MN and WI were without power during the early hours of this storm. Xcel and Co-Ops continue to work and restore power to their customers.