Michigan power outages from 2007 MLK Day ice storm

From the AP Wire via MLive:

About 127,000 customers were without power Monday afternoon because of an icy winter storm that struck Michigan overnight, glazing roads and bringing down electrical wires.

DTE Energy said it was working to restore power to 80,000 customers in southeastern Michigan, while Consumers Energy had 47,000 customers without service throughout the southern part of the state.

Consumers said residents in the hardest-hit areas, including Jackson County, might not receive electric service until Wednesday. Other Consumers customers in southern Michigan were expected to have power restored by Tuesday.

DTE Energy has tips for dealing with a power outage, which you should print and not rely on the net for. These include having a battery-powered radio, extra batteries, flashlights, matches, candles, bottled water, a manual can opener and some non-perishable food, a wind-up or battery operated clock, and a corded telephone. (They don't add "and a cell phone", but that's usually a good idea too.) Their web site has next to zero current status information about the power problems.

Consumers Energy's online newsroom has actual informative status updates, but no RSS feed (sigh) and no permalinks for news releases (sigh). As of 9:30pm Monday they report

Approximately 46,000 Consumers Energy electric customers are without service due to the winter storm that has impacted counties across southern Michigan. Since late Sunday evening, more than 80,000 customers have been affected by weather-related outages.

The approximate numbers of Consumers Energy electric customers remaining without service in and around the following areas are as follows: Adrian (300); Battle Creek (6,900); Bronson (1,200); Jackson (25,000); Jonesville (7,500) and Kalamazoo (4,700).

The majority of customers without power in Branch, Calhoun, Hillsdale, Kalamazoo and St. Joseph counties should receive electric service by midnight on Tuesday. Customers in the hardest hit areas, including Jackson county, may not receive electric service until Wednesday. Additional snow, ice and wind activity may extend restoration times. Estimates will be updated as assessment and repairs continue.

Consumers Energy cautions area residents to avoid touching any downed wires and to report them immediately by calling 1-800-477-5050, or your local law enforcement agency.

There is a lot of ice on the trees, and if the wind starts to whip up this could get much worse before it gets better.

Technorati Tags: annarbor, michigan, power, outage, dte, cms

Comments

[Lance Carlson]

I've been without power since yesterday morning! I live in Loch Alpine so it's kind of in the boonies.. and last night I called DTE and tried to get an update on the situation. After traversing through their awful automated voice recognition system, their final response was something like "We're having issues due to weather in your area. Any estimate you may have gotten before is no longer valid. We're sorry for the inconvenience". Waking up in disappointment, I called again and they gave "give or take 7 hours". Hopefully after I finish cafe hopping the problem will have been dealt with!

[Dave New]

We suffered about an hour's outage that evening, so that DTE could clear a line that had fallen on a neigbor's fence. We are dependent on a sump pump, and since the ground was saturated and it had been raining earlier, we were nervously watching the water rise in the well.

The last time we had a sump failure, the basement floor drain was also clogged, and we ended up with about two inches of water in most of the basement. Ugh, what a mess. I suppose better than those folks in the Old West Side that were having the 'sanitary' (ironic name, that) back up in their basements the last couple of summers.

The greatest damage we took was to our trees, and to my wife's brand new (less than 1000 miles) minivan, which got several dents in the roof, side door, and tailgate when a branch about the diameter of my arm fell from about 40 feet. On the bright side, it's a company car, so their insurance will fix it and it goes back to the marshalling yard after a year, to get a new one.

I was off work that day, and ending up spending most of it cutting up all the large branches that had fallen out of a couple of trees, and stacking it on the curb.