Parts of Michigan still without power after storms

Some Michigan residents faced a fourth straight day without power on Sunday as crews worked to restore power to more than 165,000 Detroit-area homes and businesses after last week’s ice storm.

Leah Thomas, whose home north of Detroit lost power Wednesday night, was still waiting for service to return Sunday afternoon.

Thomas said she felt lucky that she and her 17-year-old son were able to stay at his parents’ home, which is nearby and has electricity, while they are in Florida.

With her husband out of town, Thomas said she had to use her car to recharge their home’s backup sump pump battery. He went to various stores to find a cord long enough.

“I’m a strong woman. I solved it,” he said. “Our basement is fine, we’re lucky.”

But with winter vacations in the local school district, Thomas said some of his neighbors are out of town and when they return they’ll find a mess of burst pipes and flooded basements.

“They don’t know what awaits them,” he said.

In Southeast Michigan, still reeling from the ice storm and high winds, the state’s two main utility companies – DTE Energy and Consumers Energy – reported that some 168,000 homes and businesses were still without power at 6:00:00 p.m. Sunday. Some 132,000 were DTE customers.

The two companies said they hoped to restore service to the most affected customers by Sunday evening.

DTE Energy spokeswoman Cindy Hecht said some of the company’s commercial and residential customers have been without power since Wednesday evening, but she did not say how many.

He added that work to restore service has taken a long time due to the large number of damaged cables, some of which connect residences to the power line.

Wednesday’s frost covered cables and trees with at least half an inch (1.2 centimeters) of ice. High winds followed the storm, leaving more than 600,000 DTE customers without power at the height of the storm.

Hecht said it was the second-largest outage the DTE has ever experienced, surpassed only by a March 2017 storm that knocked out power to some 800,000 consumers.