DETROIT – “This is going to take awhile to restore all of the customers.”
It’s not what hundreds of thousands of Metro Detroiters wanted to hear Thursday when they tuned into a DTE Energy update to find out when their power would return.
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Trevor Lauer, the president and COO of DTE Electric, said about 485,000 customers are currently without power because of a storm that brought a quarter of an inch of ice to the area Wednesday into Thursday.
During his 11:30 a.m. Thursday (Feb. 23) update, Lauer gave customers some insight into what they can expect in the coming days.
Thursday: Downed wires, some restoration
“Our No. 1 priority today is to cover wire downs,” Lauer said. “We have approximately 3,200 people out in the field working today.”
DTE officials said 1,500 line workers and hundreds of other employees are responding to reports of downed wires. At the same time, crews are hoping to quickly restore power to many of those who are currently in the dark.
“We will be restoring customers (today),” Lauer said. “I expect that we will restore 100,000, or slightly more than 100,000 customers.”
Restoration timeline
Lauer reiterated the expectation is that 95% of customers who are currently without power will have it restored by the end of the day Sunday.
“My expectation for DTE, knowing all the information we have right now, is that by the end of the day on Sunday, we’ll have 95% of our customers restored,” Lauer said. “There will be customers that do not have power still on Monday.
“Our goal will be to have all the schools restored on Monday so that the kids can go back to school on Monday. So if your school’s out today, most likely it’ll be out tomorrow, but we will plan on having all the schools back so they can be back for school on Monday.”
He said restoring power to hospitals and medical systems is a priority. Anyone who has a family member or friend needing oxygen should call firefighters or DTE Energy for help getting that person somewhere safe.
What caused these widespread outages?
Ice started to load on power lines around 5 p.m. Wednesday, according to Lauer. He said about 2,000 wires came down between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.
“Ice causes significant damage, so when you have an ice storm and it brings down large trees and large branches, it’ll break utility poles and bring down wires,” Lauer said. “The damage will take longer than normal to restore, and we will work through that.”
More outages ahead?
As of noon Thursday, ice is still frozen on wires across the state. DTE officials are expecting 30-40 mph winds by 3 p.m.
“Right now, what we really need, is everything to melt before the winds start,” Lauer said. “If everything is still frozen when the winds start, these outage numbers across the state are going to climb, and they could climb in a pretty significant way because the ice is still sitting on everything.”
Wind could also delay restoration efforts, because when gusts rise above 40 mph, crews can’t go up and work in elevated positions.
“Luckily, the winds will die down again tonight, “Lauer said. “It’s going to get pretty cold this weekend, so making a big dent in this restoration today, tomorrow, going into Saturday, is going to be very important, because we do see cold weather coming back into Michigan this weekend.”
DTE apologizes for outages
“On behalf of DTE -- and I’ll say it for all the utilities in the state right now -- apologize to all of our customers for the historic nature of this ice storm and what they’re going to go through,” Lauer said. “But I do want you to know that we have an army out here. We are going to restore your power. We are going to get to every single customer and get everybody back as fast as we can.”