DETROIT – During a news conference Tuesday morning a DTE Energy spokeswoman said 7,000 customers remain without power after last week's wind storm. That number was reduced to 4,000 by Tuesday afternoon.
Heather Rivard, senior vice president of distribution operations, said these remaining 7,000 outages are scattered across the company's southeast Michigan service area. About 800,000 customers were affected by the widespread outage. Some customers have been living without power for nearly seven days.
Story: 'This is the largest weather event in DTE history'
Rivard said the company is disappointed power could not be restored to 100 percent of customers by Monday night.
Watch the news conference above (standby).
"We're not happy that we did not meet our goal to restore all of the storm customers at 11:30 p.m. (Monday). We did everything we could to make that happen," she said.
DTE has not offered an estimate for when those without power will get it back.
"What we're focused on toady is the 7,000 customers that have been out since Wednesday," said Rivard. "Our hope is to get them all back today."
The company said Tuesday morning its biggest challenge continues to be the number of jobs with extensive damage.
"Our restoration process begins by isolating damage to restore as many customers as possible, and then returning to fix the real damage and small pockets of customers," a DTE statement read.
Rivard reiterated this as the top challenge facing the field workers.
VIEW: Timeline of restoration effort
Customers can call DTE at 800-477-4747 or use the DTE Energy Mobile app to report downed lines.
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