Fergus Falls Cleans Up After Sunday’s Storm Leaves Mess Scattered Through City

that includes fallen power lines and trees as well as some flooding

FERGUS FALLS, Minn. — On average, the Fergus Falls Fire Department responds to a call every couple of days.

During Sunday night’s storm, they had 16.

“For us to get 16 calls for service in a day is pretty significant especially with that short of a time frame,” said Fergus Falls fire chief Ryan Muchow.

The storm hit just after 5:00 last night, knocking down several trees and power lines.

Some areas got up to three inches of rain.

The Fergus Falls Fire Department shared this photo on its Facebook page of a tree that got caught in some power lines on Sheridan Street and Hampden Avenue.

This morning, a Fergus Falls Public Works crew was still cleaning up from the storm’s mess.

“Initially, we had some staff come in to deal with some street flooding. From there it went to picking up storm damaged trees, limbs and full trees. With the trees that came down, there’s also some power outages,” said Public Works director Len Taylor.

More than 550 people lost power but Otter Tail Power Company was able to restore it within a few hours.

Before it was turned back on, it was time to take care of the lift stations.

“We’ve got lift stations that are affected by power outages so we had some staff that were cycling between four different lift stations, making sure they were staying down so that no sewers backed up into homes,” Taylor said.

Taylor says there hasn’t been any signs of structural damage.

Despite the mess the storm created, he says Mother Nature cut Fergus Falls some slack Sunday.

“It definitely could have been worse. With how the storm was developing, it looked like it was really going to his us hard and do some damage. Just fortunate that we were spared the really severe damage,” Taylor said.

Fergus Falls’ Fire Department has 39 on–call firefighters.

All of them were called in yesterday to assist.