The storms that rolled through West Michigan and across the state the past few days were some of the worst from the standpoint of power outages.
Tuesday evening, severe thunderstorms packing high winds toppled trees and power lines from Muskegon north and pushing east through Grand Rapids, Big Rapids, Cadillac and inland to Mid-Michigan. Roughly 200,000 homes and businesses lost power. Wednesday afternoon, a second round of storms developing in Southwest Michigan cut power to 70,000. Round three swept across the state Wednesday evening into Thursday morning from the West Michigan lakeshore to Flint. A total of 370,000 homes and businesses in the dark.
“This is up there in terms of our top 10.”
Guy Packard is Consumers Energy’s Vice President for Electric Operations.
“So, this is part of all one weather pattern that as soon as this weather pattern comes through today that will be officially the end of it.”
As of 4pm Thursday, 146,000 customers have had their power restored. Consumers has 536 line crews spread out across the state working 16-hour days. Another 26 out-of-state mutual assistance teams are arriving. The utility estimates another 100,000 customers will have their lights back on Friday afternoon.
In West Michigan, areas hardest hit by the storms, and where line crews are hard at work, are Belding, areas surrounding Greenville, Dorr, and Fremont where the entire city went dark.
Consumers estimates all power restored by Saturday night.