DETROIT (WXYZ) — More than 5,000 people in Northwest Detroit are without power due to an equipment problem, according to the DTE Energy outage map.
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The outage spans a corridor that is bordered by 7 Mile to the north, Greenfield to the east, Grand River & Southfield to the south and McNichols and Grand River to the west.
According to DTE, an underground cable failure near the Grand River and Southfield Freeway area caused the outage.
"Crews are onsite making extensive repairs and are working as quickly and safely as possible to restore service. At this time, we expect power to be restored by the end of the day. We are also staging utility-sized generators in the community as a backup measure while repairs continue. While our goal is to restore power through permanent repairs as quickly as possible, the generators provide another option should repairs take longer than expected," DTE said in a statement. "We understand being without power is especially challenging during periods of high temperatures, and we apologize for the inconvenience. Restoring service to impacted customers remains our top priority, and crews will continue working until power is safely restored to everyone affected."
Jerry Tullio, the director of regional customer operations for DTE, said that there were two cable failures for the power lines that feed the substations on Tuesday night that knocked out power to 7,800 people. Overnight, they were able to restore power to about 2,300 people.
Hear more from DTE in the video below
Tullio said that underground cable failures are exceptionally complex to find and fix, and that crews have to test cables piece by piece on over a mile of each stretch of cable.
He said that crews are working around the clock to get everyone power back, and that there are two parallel paths to restoring power. First is finding where the damage is and fixing it, and second is deploying utility-size generators throughout the community.
Some residents who are impacted by the power outages say they have been hanging out and even sleeping in their cars to cope with the heat.
“It’s miserable with the car… I want to sleep in my bed," said Detroit resident Tiffany Jones-Frost.
Another resident decided to spend the day in a kiddie pool with her daughter.
“Going to fill it up today and that’s how we’re going to stay cool and let her play in the water", said Detroit resident Nikki Hill.
For those without power, there are DTE ambassadors at the Adams-Butzel Complex and Cromwell Recreational Center with water and ice.
Tullio said that they expect to restore power to most people by the end of the day Wednesday.
