April storms do damage across the region

“We’re going to repair the fence and make it safe for use in a temporary capacity until the season is finished, then we’ve got a few quotes coming and we’ll build something sturdier after the season is complete,” said Buildings and Grounds superintendent Lee Morem.

Morem said Superior Fence who installed the original fencing as well as American Fencing out of Rochester will be providing the district with the quotes.

Superior Fence is the company who installed the structure currently at the baseball fields.

Caledonia area public schools were left to swiftly react following this past week’s heavy winds, rains and heavy snows which damaged the back-stop to the ball fields.

“This way we shouldn’t have to miss or reschedule any games,” Morem added.

He noted that the shape of the ground played a role in the decision to temporarily repair the existing fence before replacing it with something stronger.

“We need to pour new footings and install larger posts and the ground is too saturated to handle that at the moment,” Morem said.

Morem and his team are going to do much of the repairs themselves while the crew at Caledonia Lumber also helps.

“We want it to be safe, and it will be when we’re all done with it, Morem said of the temporary solution. “I’ll be doing a lot of welding.”

Blown trees and power outages in both Houston and Caledonia were left in the wake of the storm.

However, we fared far better than many across the state.

The storm left as much as two feet of snow in many parts of the state.

Locally power was out for a few hours on Thursday as crews scrambled to restore it.

As of 4 p.m.,Thursday, April 11, MiEnergy Cooperative has about 900 members in Minnesota still without power due to a late winter storm bringing a combination of rain, sleet, ice and snow. The co-op estimates a total of 5,000 members were affected. Several substation outages were cause by transmission line damage. Damage was caused by ice building up on power lines combined with high winds that caused lines to gallop and break poles and sag power line. At last count, the co-op had 100 broken poles.

Crews were first called out at 7 p.m. Wednesday to restore power. They will continue to work to get as many members back online as possible until 8 p.m. today. Crews will report to work at 5 a.m. tomorrow and expect to restore all electric service, with the exception of some isolated instances.

It will take weeks to permanently fix and cleanup the damage caused by the storm.