Over 50,000 households in Latvia still without power on Monday evening

Over the course of Monday, power was restored to roughly 33,000 customers. Since Sunday morning, when outages peaked, supply has been restored to 223,000 customers — about 80% of everyone who was without power at that point.

The largest remaining disruptions are currently concentrated around Preiļi, Aizkraukle, Sigulda, Rēzekne, Jēkabpils, Ogre, Ludza, Bauska, Krāslava, Jelgava, Saulkrasti and Cēsis.

Given the scale of storm damage, grid operator Sadales tīkls warns that restoring electricity to some customers — particularly in heavily forested areas — could take several more days.

Repair work continues at scale

So far, 551 storm-related faults in the distribution network have been fixed. The effort involves 223 crews from Sadales tīkls, reinforced by seven additional crews from Estonia.

The company notes that the storm caused extensive damage both to the transmission network operated by Augstsprieguma tīkls (AST) and to the distribution network itself. Because restoring the medium-voltage network depends first on fixing the main transmission lines, part of the repair crews worked alongside AST on Monday to address transmission-line damage. Other crews are simultaneously working to restore voltage across all medium-voltage lines, after which faults in the low-voltage network will be addressed in turn. The company says this sequence allows power to be restored to the largest possible number of customers as quickly as possible.

On Monday afternoon, drones were used to inspect roughly 150 kilometers of storm-damaged power lines.

As previously reported, the strongest summer storm in decades hit Latvia on the night following August 22, with wind gusts locally exceeding 30 meters per second. The storm initially left about 277,000 Sadales tīkls customers without electricity.