Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Some in Michigan still without power
Some Michigan residents faced a fourth straight day in the dark on Sunday as crews continued working to restore power to more than 175,000 homes and businesses in the Detroit metropolitan area following last week’s ice storm.
Leah Thomas, whose home north of Detroit in the suburb of Beverly Hills lost power Wednesday night, was still waiting Sunday afternoon for the power to come back on.
Thomas said she feels lucky, because while her husband is away traveling, she and their 17-year-old son have been able to stay at her parents’ nearby home, which still has power but was unoccupied because her parents are in Florida.
With her husband out of town, Thomas said it was up to her to recharge the battery to their home’s backup sump pump Sunday with her car after she went to multiple stores to find a 30-foot cable.
“I’m a strong woman. I figured it out,” she said. “Our basement is OK, so we’re the lucky ones.”
But with the local school district on mid-winter break, Thomas said some of their neighbors have been out of town and will be returning to find a mess from burst water pipes and flooded basements.
“They don’t know what they’re coming home to. I’m concerned for them,” she said.
In hard-hit southeastern Michigan, still reeling from last week’s ice storm and high winds, the state’s two main utilities — DTE Energy and Consumers Energy — reported about 168,000 homes and businesses were without power as of about 6 p.m. EST Sunday. Most of those, about 142,000, were DTE customers, with Consumers Energy reporting about 34,000 of its customers without power.
DTE Energy spokeswoman Cindy Hecht said some of the utilities’ customers have been without power since late Wednesday, but she did not know how many homes and businesses were in that predicament.
She said the power restoration efforts have proved time-consuming because of the large number of power lines that were damaged, including individual lines that link single homes to the grid.
Wednesday’s ice storm coated lines and trees with a half an inch of ice or more, and it was followed Thursday by high winds that put about 600,000 DTE customers in the dark at the storm’s peak. Hecht said that was the second-largest number of outages DTE has ever experienced, topped only by a March 2017 wind storm that cut power to about 800,000 of its customers.
“The icing event we had this week is equivalent to a hurricane for coastal utilities. It was the amount of ice and high winds — the winds and the amount of ice accumulation on lines and branches,” she said.
California, meanwhile, got a brief break from severe weather after a powerful storm a day earlier swelled Los Angeles-area rivers to dangerous levels, flooded roads and dumped snow at elevations as low as 1,000 feet. The sun came out briefly Sunday in greater Los Angeles, where residents emerged to marvel at mountains to the north and east that were blanketed in white.
The weather service said Mountain High, one of the closest ski resorts to Los Angeles, received an eye-popping 7.75 feet of snow during the last storm, with more possible this week.
Rain and snow were falling again Sunday in Northern California as the first of two new storms started to move in. Blizzard warnings went into effect at 4 a.m. today and will last until Wednesday for much of the Sierra Nevada, where crews were still clearing roads after last week’s icy storm.
“Extremely dangerous and near to impossible mountain travel is expected due to heavy snow and strong wind,” the weather service’s Sacramento office warned on Twitter.
After fierce winds toppled trees and downed wires, more than 65,000 utility customers remained without electricity statewide as of Sunday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.us. The majority of the outages were in Los Angeles.
Days of downpours dumped almost 11 inches of rain in the Woodland Hills area of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, while nearly 7 inches were reported in Beverly Hills.
In Valencia, north of Los Angeles, county officials said the heavy rains eroded an embankment at an RV park and swept multiple motorhomes into the Santa Clara River, with emergency video showing one of the vehicles toppled on its side. A representative from the RV park said no one was injured.
Rare blizzard warnings for Southern California mountains and widespread flood watches ended late Saturday. But Interstate 5, the West Coast’s major north-south highway, was closed off and on due to heavy snow and ice in the Tejon Pass through the mountains north of Los Angeles. Emergency crews were also working to clear mountain roads east of Los Angeles that were inundated with snow and ice.