UPDATE: Power Restored, No Serious Damage Reported

UPDATE: After a severe thunderstorm hit Wauwatosa Tuesday afternoon and knocked out power to hundreds of businesses and homes, We Energies says that as of 7 a.m. Wednesday, only two customer remained without service.

There were still about 400 customers in Milwaukee County who didn't have power Wednesday morning, almost all in the City of Milwaukee.

Deputy Fire Chief Jim Case said Wednesday that there were no weather-related calls during a second round of drenching thunderstorms that hit in the evening.

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A severe thunderstorm that struck Wauwatosa about 3:15 p.m. Tuesday left 405 customers without power, according to We Energies.

The area hardest hit was a largely industrial and commercial zone centered along Hwy. 45 just south of Capitol Drive, where 314 customers were affected when the power failed at 3:50 p.m. The cause of the that outage was under investigation and it was not known what business customers might have had shutdowns.

Deputy Fire Chief Jim Case said that one of about a dozen calls received by the Tosa Fire Department during the storm was to the 4500 block of North 124th Street was for a large bundle of wires down in a parking lot.

"I would guess that was your culprit," Case said.

As for the rest, "We had wires down, trees down, but no injuries and no major property damage," he said.

Cathy Schulze, a spokeswoman for We Energies, said she could not pinpoint what was happening in that area or other localized outages in Wauwatosa.

"Outages are widespread in southeast Wisconsin," she said. "We've got about 16,000 customers without power altogether, with about 3,200 in Milwaukee County.

"The best thing I can say right now is that often these are caused by downed lines, and if you do see a line down, please don't go near it; call us. Don't try to do anything yourself."