Michigan power line work continues after ice storm
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 176,000 homes and businesses were without power as of about 3:30 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.
Both utilities said they still hope to have the lights back on by Sunday night for a majority of their affected customers.
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 timeconsuming 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 (1.27 centimeters) 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.
Hecht said the utility’s meteorologists have been tracking another storm system that will move into Michigan on Monday, and the utility is “prepared to respond.”