Michigan power crews work, California recovers after storms

Some Michigan residents faced a fourth straight day without power Sunday as crews continued work to restore electricity more than 165,000 homes and businesses in the greater Detroit area following last week’s ice storm.

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

Thomas said she feels lucky that she and their 17-year-old son have been able to stay at her parents’ nearby home, which still has power, while they are in Florida.

With her husband traveling out of town, Thomas said it was up to her to recharge the battery to their home’s backup sump pump Sunday with her car. She went to multiple stores to find a long cable for the task.

“I’m a strong woman. I figured it out,” she said. “Our basement is OK, so we’re the lucky ones.”

But with the local school district on mid-winter break, Thomas said some of their neighbors have been out of town and will be returning to find a mess from burst water pipes and flooded basements.

“They don’t know what they’re coming home to,” she said.

In hard-hit southeastern Michigan, still reeling from the ice storm and high winds, the state’s two main utilities — DTE Energy and Consumers Energy — reported about 168,000 homes and businesses were without power as of about 6 p.m. Sunday. About 132,000 of those were DTE customers.

Both utilities said they still hoped to have the lights back on by Sunday night for a majority of their affected customers.

DTE Energy spokeswoman Cindy Hecht said some DTE business and residential customers have been without power since late Wednesday, but she did not know how many.

She said power restoration efforts have proven time-consuming because of the large number of damaged lines, including individual lines linking single homes on the grid.

Wednesday’s ice storm coated lines and trees with a half an inch (more than 1.25 centimeters) of ice or more. The storm was followed Thursday by high winds that put about 600,000 DTE customers in the dark at the storm’s peak.

Hecht said that was the second-largest number of outages DTE has ever experienced, topped only by a 2017 storm that cut power to about 800,000 of its customers.