DETROIT – DTE Energy continues to work on restoring power to much of Metro Detroit.
While the company has made significant progress since Thursday, as of 1 p.m. Friday, more than 252,000 customers are still out of power.
DTE has thousands of crews working to get things back on track and the company wants residents to know how they plan to fix everything.
“Teams have been working really hard since Wednesday to get everybody restored,” said DTE president Trevor Lauer. “Storms came through about 4 o’clock on Wednesday and I expect we’re going have it largely completed on Sunday. We’ve got some pretty extensive damage in areas and those pockets are going to take longer for our teams to restore.”
Read: DTE Energy: 95% of power outages to be restored by Sunday night
A car that had collided with a power pole on M-59 was repaired in about a half an hour.
A tree had fallen onto powerlines on the street behind Orchard Lake Country Club, causing a small fire.
“We were able to isolate it at a certain point. Part of the crew came here earlier and isolated it,” said DTE crew leader Tom Swayne. “Right when we pulled up, they lit up about 150 people and there are 50 left.”
The work is exhausting. Even more so by the fact that DTE has been working hard for six weeks on power issues since the last weather event.
“All the men are tired. Some of these guys are sleep deprived. It’s been wearing, but it’s enjoyable when we turn on a neighborhood like this,” Swayne said. “It’s an enjoyable thing too.”
You can see the DTE Energy Outage Map here.
Consumers Energy reports power has been restored to more than 200,000 customers. They hope to restore another 100,000 by the end of Friday and have all restoration work completed by the end of the weekend.
Nearly a million Michigan households lose power -- Why does this keep happening?
Nearly one million Michigan households were without power Thursday after severe storms blew through the Midwest.
Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois all saw outages, but Michigan seems to have been hit the hardest, having more than 10 times the outages than the other states.
At its peak in Wisconsin, the state had 63,000 customers without power. Illinois and Indiana peaked at about 30,000 each. Ohio peaked at 62,000. Michigan, however, peaked at 864,000 customers without power on as temperatures soar on one of the hottest days of the year.