Portions of Southwest Ferndale Experience Brownouts, Outages Sunday Night

UPDATE: As of 11 p.m. Sunday, Ferndale's southwest end of town had its power restored.

After three days of outages in Ferndale that affected as many as 6,000 homes and businesses at its peak, Ferndale's southwest end of town is having issues again Sunday. 

Starting at about 7:30 p.m. Sunday, several residents reported they were experiencing brownouts, or a dip in voltage.

Ferndale Police Chief Tim Collins said the reason was a wire down on Alberta.

DTE Spokesman Len Singer said the issue was due to a storm that blew through the area shortly before 7:30 p.m. "It's completely unrelated to the issue this week," he said. However, residents said there was no storm, though one did hit south of Ferndale about that time.

About 200 customers were experiencing brownouts and outages Sunday night in southwest Ferndale, Singer said.

Starting at about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Ferndale's power started going out. As many as 5,000 customers were without power Wednesday night. Outages carried over throughout Thursday and Friday until the power was finally restored Saturday morning at about 6 a.m.

The line at issue Sunday fell into George Chapp's backyard at Beaufield and Alberta. He said it's the third time in three weeks that this line has fallen. "They keep splicing it and splicing it. They need to fix this line," he said.

Three weeks ago, Chapp said, the line snapped and wrapped around his cable connection and melted that. It popped again Friday, he said. "I thought it was just 'cause of the outage," he said. Sunday night, it happened again. "Fortunately, I wasn't home but my neighbor saw it. He said there was a big explosion, like fireworks," Chapp said.

"My biggest thing is, I have a 20-month-old and my neighbor has a 2-year-old. Is DTE going to wait until someone dies?" Chapp said. "This needs to be done right this time."

DTE is sensitive to what Ferndale has gone through this past week and working on the repair, Singer said.

"We're prioritizing this issue and expect it to be cleared up this evening," he said. "We're sensitive to what Ferndale has been through; they've been through a lot."