One year ago Wednesday, the power went out in the city of Detroit. The massive failure sent buildings, including government centers, into darkness for hours.
A cable failure at the Mistersky power station caused five hours of trouble.
Beau Taylor with the city's public lighting department says, "There is an auto correct mechanism that has been installed so this specific problem will not happen again."
The goal is to isolate or correct failures and prevent them from spreading throughout the system.
But that's a short term band-aid for an outdated power source.
Detroit's public lighting department is in the middle of a multi year takeover by DTE Energy. Those buildings that blacked out were on the old PLD grid.
DTE is already in the process of taking folks off that grid and onto theirs.
"We are taking customers off as fast as we can," says Karen Whitman with DTE.
And they say the reduced load on PLD alone dramatically reduces the chance of a repeat.
