DTE Energy: Outages continue for some, power grid upgrades underway
(CBS DETROIT) - Some people are still without power as of Friday night, but DTE Energy said crews will work through the holiday weekend until power is restored to everyone.
The power company said they have more than 3,000 people working around the clock to make this happen.
"Really proud of the team, really proud of the work they're doing," said Matt Paul, executive vice president of Distribution Operations at DTE Energy. "Most of them are working 16-hour shifts."
Monday's storm knocked down more than 3,300 wires and damaged many individual service points.
"This really ranks as one of the more challenging, significant storms in our company's history," said Paul.
The company prioritized public safety-first restoring power to hospitals, then repairing circuits with the most customers.
By the end of Friday, DTE Energy said more than 95% of customers will be back online.
"We will likely have a small number of folks that will go into the weekend before they are restored," said Paul. "They will tend to be our single customer outages, but just a small number will likely go into the weekend."
While this week's winds would have wreaked havoc on any power grid of any age, DTE Energy said it didn't help that Detroit's infrastructure is dated.
"A lot of our original infrastructure was built as Detroit was growing, Detroit being one of the first large cities to industrialize, so our grid is older," said Paul.
The company said while they're working to restore power, they're also making improvements to our grid.
"We are in the process of building the grid of the future," said Paul. "That is going to be not only hardening but a significant rebuild and modernization of our grid. reliability will continue to improve and really set the state to continue to power growth in Southeast Michigan."
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