Nearly 800,000 homes and businesses in Michigan lost power after an extreme ice storm tore down thousands of electricity lines, snapped utility poles and toppled trees.
(Bloomberg) — Nearly 800,000 homes and businesses in Michigan lost power after an extreme ice storm tore down thousands of electricity lines, snapped utility poles and toppled trees.
DTE Energy, which serves the Detroit metro area, reported extensive damage to its electrical system with more than 575,000 customers losing service as of Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages across the US. Consumers Energy, the other big Michigan utility, reported about 200,000 customers were also without power.
“We saw ice amounts three-quarters of an inch throughout Southeastern Michigan and that’s a level we haven’t seen in nearly 50 years” said Matt Paul, executive vice president of distribution operations at DTE Energy, said during a press briefing.
The ice, which can add more than 1,000 pounds or the equivalent of a baby grand piano to a span of wire, caused more than 2,000 power lines to fall down in the Detroit area, Paul said.
DTE Energy said it expects to restore service to 95% of customers by the end of the day Sunday.
Michigan has been swept up in severe winter weather that’s hitting western and northern parts of the US this week, cancelling flights, snarling traffic and cutting power to more than a million customers.
The widespread outages are another example of how the aging US power grid remains vulnerable to extreme weather events. Millions of Americans lost power in late December during a deadly winter storm that cut power to millions and triggered rotating blackouts in several southeastern states.
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