From 2:30 a.m. Sunday until 4 p.m. Tuesday — 61½ hours — the home of John Garrison and his wife did not have electricity.

“That is a long time to be without power,” said Garrison, 72, who lives 2 miles south of Sunriver. The Garrisons kept a fire going in their fireplace during the outage. “And I have a generator that I pulled out just to keep the house warm,” he said.

For meals during the outage they either went out to eat or brought home sandwiches.

They were not alone in fighting the cold and trying to cope without power. A wintry storm dropped heavy, wet snow over the weekend and crushed parts of the 1,500-mile power line system of Midstate Electric Cooperative. The cooperative provides power to about 18,849 members in a 5,600-square-mile area south of Bend.

At the height of the outage, about 9,000 members — nearly half of Midstate’s members — did not have power, said Teresa Lackey, marketing and communications manager for the cooperative. As of Tuesday evening, at least 572 members were still without power. She said the outage was affecting the cooperative’s communication equipment so some outages might be going undetected.

Midstate has five repair crews and the cooperative brought in two extra, one from Harney Electric Cooperative in Burns and another from Consumers Power Inc. in Philomath.

“We have crews working around the clock,” she said. She said it is hard to estimate when power might be restored.

The American Red Cross established a shelter in La Pine on Monday, but Lackey said as of Tuesday afternoon no one had used it.

In bringing back power, the crews must start at substations and distribution lines and work their way to power lines leading to neighborhoods and individual homes. Lackey said they try to return power to the most people in the shortest amount time.

For Robert Northrup, 73, who lives with his wife about 5 miles west of La Pine, the power was out for about 28 hours, from around 2 p.m. Sunday to Monday evening .

Like the Garrisons, the couple used a wood stove and a generator to ride out the outage.

Along with powering his refrigerator, Northrup used the generator to power a shop light that brightened their living room and kitchen. He also plugged in their Internet gear, providing Wi-Fi to their phones.

“So we had all the comforts of home and technology,” he said. The couple made stew on their wood stove while the power was out.

He said the snow could have been even deeper, and people living in Central Oregon should be braced for it. Particularly important in preparing for a power outage is storing up water.

The Garrisons and Northrups both draw groundwater with electric pumps so the outages left them without running water.

To highlight what items Central Oregonians might want during an outage, Northrup suggested people try going 12 hours in their home without power.

Midstate is not the only power provider recovering from the weekend snowstorm. Pacific Power also had repairs crews busy Tuesday and power was still out at the resort and cabins at Diamond Lake, said Tom Gauntt, spokesman for the company.

Since Saturday, state Highway 138 East near Diamond Lake has been closed by the Oregon Department of Transportation because of deep snow and downed trees. Some of those trees fell into Pacific Power lines.

Crews hope to have the highway, as well as state Highway 230 near Crater Lake, open today, said Gary Leaming, spokesman for the department in Southern Oregon . In places, 5 to 6 feet of snow covers Highway 138 .

“This is a lot of snow,” he said.

— Reporter: 541-617-7812,

ddarling@bendbulletin.com