Power has been restored to nearly 16,000 Xcel Energy customers in the east metro following a major failure Friday morning.
A spokeswoman for Xcel Energy says some residents in St. Paul, Maplewood, Oakdale, Woodbury, Landfall and Landfall Village lost power around 11:30 a.m. The outage occurred after a transformer at a substation failed while Xcel crews were working on a second transformer at the station.
It's still not clear what caused the transformer to fail but power was fully restored around 2:15 p.m.
Employees at the 3M's corporate campus in Maplewood were told to go home after the building lost power. The 3M Center employs about 10,000 people.
The outage also affected businesses at the SunRay shopping center.
(Copyright 2009 by KARE. All Rights Reserved.)
