Community Corner

Mall, Library, YMCA Go Dark After Small Fire

A power failure affected thousands in Minnetonka today.

For almost two hours and on a day when , more than 6,500 Minnetonka homes and businesses suddenly lost power this afternoon.

Most of the Minnetonka's Ridgedale retail district near the intersection of Interstates 394 and 494 experienced a loss in electricity. ,  and  were among those affected by the outage.

According to a spokesman for Xcel Energy, the power failure was the result of a small fire at a substation in Plymouth.

Find out what's happening in Minnetonkawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“It was a piece of equipment that burned up,” Steve Roalstad told Patch. That incident reportedly occurred just after 3:30 p.m. By 5:30 p.m., most power had been restored, Roalstad said.  

Without power, retail stores at Ridgedale Center closed. As of 6:30 p.m. and with power restored, many of the stores have reopened. 

Find out what's happening in Minnetonkawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The has closed for the remainder of today. 

Ridgedale Library also shut their doors during the outage. And because the Ridgedale location houses the headquarters of the Hennepin County Library System, the HCL website and internet catalog also went down for the duration of the power failure. 


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here