Community Corner

Some Residents Go 4 Days Without Power; DTE Investigating Inaccurate Restoration Estimates

One resident saved the homemade, organic baby food but another lost a chance to spend time with his kids.

Ferndale residents Stevie and Catherine Michael make their own organic baby food from the yield of their garden. Broccoli, squash, zucchini and other vegetables are pulled, plucked and pureed, then put in jars and stored in the freezer for Louis, their 1 1/2-year-old son.

So, on Saturday evening, when a massive storm blew through Ferndale, knocking down trees and power lines and, Stevie–after making sure his family was safe–thought about the baby food.

"That's months and months of work and organic baby food," he said.

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Luckily his neighbor across the street still had power.

"He let us run an extension cord to our freezer to save the food," Stevie said. "He was being a good neighbor."

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This storm comes on the heels of another multi-day outage in July due to system stress and heat, DTE said at the time, that also.

The Michaels, who live on Leroy between Pinecrest and Livernois, were without power for four days, from Saturday evening when the storm hit to early Thursday. Besides losing their patience with DTE for not restoring their power sooner and the inconvenience of having to warm Louis' food on the grill, Stevie said the family escaped the outage without losing much.

Of course, that doesn't mean the Michaels weren't frustrated. "I just think they should have been better prepared," he said. "We're paying the highest we've ever paid for electricity. We even got our bill on Saturday and it was due Monday, which we paid. But it was like a slap in the face."

Some losses were greater than others

While several residents reported losing food out of the refrigerator, Patrick Wilson-Welsh lost something greater during the four days he was without power.

"I'm a divorcee with partial custody of my kids," he said. "I should have been with my kids this weekend but my ex-wife and I determined that it might not be the safest place for them."

Besides the storm damage, Wilson-Welsh, who lives off the Interstate 696 service drive, said there was concern of an opportunistic break-in due to the outage.

"I lost quality nights with my kids," he said.

Restoration estimates were inaccurate

Yet, Wilson-Welsh said he wasn't shocked with the response and the inaccurate estimates coming from DTE.

"I expect this from a corporation and aging infrastructure," he said. "I talked to crews who laughed when I told them the power was expected to be on that night. They told me they didn't even know when the power would be restored."

Each night after the storm, DTE told customers power would be on sometime between 9:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. These inaccurate estimations were the source of frustration for a lot of residents.

"I understand a storm and 70 mph winds, but we're not experts and when you tell us it'll be on the next day, we believe that," he said.

Patrick Montgomery also became increasingly frustrated with DTE's estimates of when his power would be restored. He said each day it was the same thing from DTE–9:30 p.m. to 11 p.m.–until it finally came on at 5 a.m. Thursday.

"I just got tired of the redundancy of the blabber," he said.

Montgomery lives on Grayson, near Mapledale. He said the outage caused him to lose $400 worth of food and the storm knocked a tree branch into his car's windshield while it was parked, shattering it.

"Personally, for them to keep saying 9:30 to 11, I took that for reality. I would have went out and got a generator, but they kept saying the power would be on at the end of the day," he said.

DTE spokesman Scott Simons said Friday afternoon that. "We recognize that there were bad estimates going out," he said. Simons said it's important that these estimates are accurate so their customers can plan their lives around outages like this.

"We'll be investigating the cause and why the estimates were inaccurate," he said. "We're looking at the estimation process to determine what happened there."

Catastrophic storm, state of emergency

In addition to the 7,000 without power in Ferndale after the storm hit, there were about 120,000 without power in southeast Michigan. Simons said DTE considers a storm that leaves 100,000 or more without power catastrophic.

Out-of-state crews from Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania were called in to assist DTE crews with the cleanup and restoration effort. Simons said that although every storm creates different problems, DTE follows a storm plan, while crews work 16-hour shifts, through the night. Simons said that as many as 1,000 workers were working the restoration effort throughout the service area and as many as 150 crews were working in Ferndale alone.

Despite the fact that on Thursday afternoon most of the outages had been taken care of, Ferndale Mayor Dave Coulter signed paperwork that would declare. The mayor's action could result in the city receiving $30,000 for its cleanup efforts from the state, even though the cleanup, Ferndale City Manager April McGrath said, could cost as much as $100,000.

"This doesn't mean things have gotten worse," Coulter said Thursday. "What this does mean is that Ferndale can now qualify for state funding that will go toward the cost of cleanup."

The city had conducted a walkthrough of Ferndale and identified more than 100 homes damaged from the storm, McGrath said.

Despite the dark, there was some light

In light of the dark, some residents said they found new ways to do things.

"We learned to do a lot of new things by candlelight," Pleasant Ridge resident Brad Parks said. "Like shave by candlelight, make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the kids' lunches by candlelight. Candlelight is underrated."

Parks, whose power was also out for four days, said his family was lucky that there was no damage and nothing was lost. "We're glad it's back," he said. "You don't think about it until it's gone."

Along Ridge Road in Pleasant Ridge, dozens of trees came down. The road, from Oakridge north, resembled a lumberyard with brush and branches stacked on the curb four feet high and massive trees cut to fireplace length.

"The devastation was tremendous on Ridge Road," said Rob Wunderlich, a Pleasant Ridge resident who lives on Oakland Park, near Woodward.

Wunderlich was without power for three days and, again, was lucky. "The biggest thing we had were twigs in our yard and I'll mow over them this weekend," he said. Yet, on both sides of him, his neighbors had large, old trees come down in the yards.

"We were extremely lucky," he said.


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