Michigan got another round of severe weather on Monday.
Strong thunderstorms passed through the Lower Peninsula, leaving tens of thousands of Michiganders without power. At one point Monday, Consumers Energy had more than 80,000 customers down and DTE Energy reported more than 21,000 affected by outages.
For an update on the restoration work, Consumers Energy Vice President of Electric Distribution Greg Salisbury joined Michigan Public's Doug Tribou on Morning Edition.
Doug Tribou: The outages from this storm are pretty widespread in the southern half or two-thirds, roughly, of your service area. The bulk are between Mt. Pleasant south to about Kalamazoo. What are your crews seeing in the areas that were hardest hit?
Greg Salisbury: We were ready for this one. We had winds from 70 to even 90 mph and we've seen a few broken poles. But this thing moved so fast, we've been able to do a lot of restoration already. It's more wires down and trees and limbs, not as much heavy damage. Although 88,000 total customers were affected, we have restored almost 62,000 already in the afternoon and overnight hours. And we're making great progress.
DT: As you and I are speaking [on Tuesday morning], more than 25,000 people still don't have electricity. When can they expect to have their power back?
GS: We have 500 crews on the system today. The people who are out of power should be restored later today or tonight in the hardest hit areas. There is another round of thunderstorms due to impact the state around 1 p.m. this afternoon. So we will focus on the current outages first, and then we'll shift to those critical priority and school customer locations from whatever the next wave brings us.
DT: Whenever these situations arise, it's important to remind people about safety advice if they see downed lines and that sort of thing. Can you remind us what people should be thinking about if they're in an area that's affected?
GS: First, assume every downed wire could be live and please stay at least 25 feet away. Call our call center or call 911. And between us and the hard working first responders out there, we will make sure that we get those wires safely de-energized and out of the way.
Second, if you choose to use a portable generator, please keep those away from the house. Certainly never run one in a garage or near an open window or door.
And lastly, our crews are out there working in some hazardous conditions, and traffic control is a key factor in keeping them safe and allowing them to move through restoration. So please slow down, assess the situation, and move around our crews carefully.
DT: These storms don't just pass through Michigan. This is a series of storms that passed through the Midwest Monday. Yet this morning, according to poweroutage.us, which is a power outage tracking site, Michigan is the only state in the northern part of the Midwest with more than 10,000 outages. In fact, it's up in the tens of thousands. And Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin... none of those states are even close. And that is not an uncommon occurrence to see Michigan with more outages and longer outages. Why is that? And where do things stand on trying to remedy that situation?
GS: So in this particular event, we saw the worst of the severe winds in Michigan. Often, Lake Michigan acts as an accelerant, where the winds will pick up as they cross from Wisconsin over to Michigan. Now, that being said, we need to get better.
We have a continually updated five-year reliability roadmap. We're doing record levels of work on trimming the trees, which are always our biggest hazard. And in fact, we're doing special line clearing in the areas closest to our substations where a tree-caused outage would affect the most customers.
Second, every single time we replace a pole, whether it's during a storm or during regular construction, or when we're upgrading for the expansion of broadband service, we are replacing with two to four construction grades higher and more robust than we've used in the past.
And finally, we're undergrounding more than ever in those highest risk areas where there's just so much tree risk that it's more economical and prudent to just go underground.
Editor's note: Some quotes in this article have been lightly edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full conversation near the top of this page.
Consumers Energy and DTE Energy are among Michigan Public's corporate sponsors.
