Residents of Lockwood face the cold and darkness during the blackout

Montana – Due to a significant outage, residents of Lockwood were forced to endure the bitter cold without electricity as record-breaking low temperatures struck southeast Montana.

According to locals, the outage began on Friday night and lasted for almost three hours.

One of the numerous people that was kept in the dark was Tessa Smith and her family.

“Everything went dark and quiet,” Smith said. “We had nothing at all. Just flashlights and that was it.”

Smith claimed that her children woke up when their noise machines broke and that she tried not to panic.

“I was scared because it was so cold and I was worried about the kids,” Smith said. “We just kept them bundled up and tried to run around to stay warm.”

Although it didn’t become extremely cold inside their house, Tessa’s husband Aaron said they could definitely feel the effects.

“It started to get cold,” Aaron said. “It wasn’t bad, but we could feel it coming through the door.”

Luckily, the Smith’s lights turned on almost three hours later. On Sunday, though, the effects of the outage were still noticeable. The household doesn’t have flowing water right now since their pipes are frozen.

“Yeah, it’s not fun,” Aaron said. “It was relieving when the power came back on and we’re happy about that, but this is difficult for sure.”

It wasn’t simply the Smiths who had difficulties. The Lockwood Neighborhood Watch Facebook page featured numerous entries from families and businesses discussing how they were handling the outage.

“I know other people in our neighborhood were for sure,” Tessa said. “I was looking at Facebook and pretty much all of Lockwood was out.”

The Smiths claimed that although it was a concerning few hours, they were relieved that electricity had been restored and that they had never been informed of the reason for the interruption.

“We couldn’t get a hold of anybody, so we don’t know if there was a real reason to (the power outage),” Tessa said. “If it had been another couple hours, we would’ve gone somewhere else. It was getting too cold.”