Crews scrambling to restore power after severe storms, tornado tear through Lansing area
LANSING — Lansing Board of Water & Light and local officials asked the community for patience on Friday as the utility worked to restore power after a Thursday night storm left tens of thousands of homes and businesses across the region in the dark.
More than 30,000 BWL customers were affected by the storms, and power had been restored to about 6,000 of them by late Friday morning, BWL General Manage Dick Peffley said. About 24,800 customers remained without power as of 6 p.m.
Among the non-human casualties: about two dozen utility poles, 75 transformers and 400 wires across the service area, he said.
"We have big lift in front of us," Peffley said during an impromptu news conference in a church parking lot on West Holmes road, where a fallen tree pinned power lines to the ground. "We have the resources to restore your power. We just need the time."
BWL crews worked through the night, and the publicly owned utility called for help from its mutual aid network, Peffley said. The utility brought in 22 tree-trimming crews and more than two dozen line crews from New York, he added.
Restoration estimates varied from Friday to Aug. 29, according to BWL's outage map.
In an earlier news release, Peffley said the restoration and cleanup effort is "the largest mobilization we’ve ever had in the field responding to a storm."
Around mid-day, about 200,000 Consumers Energy customers were without power, largely along the Interstate 96 corridor from Grand Rapids to southeast Michigan, and then further south through Jackson County and near Adrian.
As of 6 p.m., about 42,000 Consumers customers were without power in Clinton, Eaton and Ingham counties, according to the utility's outage map. Statewide, about 165,000 customers were without power Friday afternoon, and the utility estimated that many of those outages would be fixed on Friday or Saturday.
Consumers said it would have 660 crews in the field, including workers from Alabama, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.
The worst-hit areas were Kent County, the Lansing region, Jackson area and southeast Michigan, it said.
More than 6,000 DTE Energy customers in the Williamston and Webberville areas had their power knocked out by the storm. DTE said on its website that "Our crews are working as quickly and safely as possible to restore power to everyone impacted. We estimate that 80% of customers affected by the storm will be restored on Saturday, with all storm outages restored by end of day Sunday. We know how challenging it is to be without power, and we have added crews from outside our area to expedite repairs."
DTE's outage map showed about 5,600 customers in eastern Ingham County remained without power as of Friday evening, with thousands more in western Livingston County.
The Tri-County Electric Cooperative also had several thousand outages in southern Ingham County and Eaton, Ionia and Clinton counties. No restoration times were immediately available.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Storms leave over 55,000 without power in Lansing region
