After days of wild weather, the big focus is now on the clean-up and getting the power back on.
DTE crews are swamped right now, working 16-hour shifts, trying to restore electricity to hundreds of thousands of people. At its peak, more than 600,000 were without power on Thursday.
The utility company said it could be until Sunday before nearly everyone has their lights back on, but said 80% of impacted customers could have power restored by Saturday night.
The wind gusts took down giant branches of trees and even downed more than 3,000 power lines throughout southeast Michigan.
Storms like the one we saw this week are becoming more frequent.
In the last eight weeks, DTE crews have faced five weather events like the one we saw over the past few days.
DTE is prioritizing hospitals, fire and police stations first, which have now mostly been restored. Then, they move to fix the largest outages, which include a place where a tree took down a DTE distribution feed in Oak Park, which knocked out power to several substations.
The utility company will be flying drones and helicopters to assess the damage.
They'll also be updating the power lines as they restore them. The
We are expecting another update from DTE on outages on Friday morning.
