(WXYZ) — It's been nearly a week since the ice storm hit Southeast Michigan and thousands are still without power.
Michigan was the worst-impacted state, with over hundreds of thousands of people affected by power outages.
So why year after year do Michiganders continue to suffer from power outages? Is there a solution in sight? One possible solution could be found in Wyandotte, where within 24 hours, electricity was restored.
How are they doing it? See it for yourself.
One resident, Karen, has been living in Wyandotte all her life and she can only count a handful of times when she lost power.
"Whenever you have lost power, how soon has it been restored?" 7 Action News asked.
"Within a couple of hours," she responded.
Excluding Karen, around 3,000 homes in Wyandotte did experience a power outage last Wednesday. But within 24 hours, most of it was restored. To figure this out, we met up with Ryan Smith from Wyandotte Municipal Services.
"As soon as we know there is an outage, calls go out, guys come in, they start working the lines," Smith said.
The swift response is possible because the city of Wyandotte manages the distribution of power, water, cable and internet all by itself.
"The coverage that DTE has to handle compared to what we have to, incredibly dense. We are 14,000 customers, but houses are next to each other, there's very little open land, we don't have forests," Smith said.
Wyandotte has four substations for a city of around 26,000 people. Their electricity is produced by DTE and delivered through ITC.
Paul LaManes from Wyandotte Municipal Services says compared to other utility companies, Wyandotte also offers cheaper electricity by charging residents less than 16 cents per kilowatt-hour.
"We have tree trimmers that are in the city every single day of the year. And we are constantly reinvesting the money that ratepayers are paying back into the system. Whether it's fortifying the distribution line or taking some services underground," Smith said.
"The idea of public power was brought forth back in the late 1800s. So it's paid off over the years," he added. "Now is it something other municipalities could explore? That's a real difficult question because there is a lot of infrastructure that is already in place and how you would ever unwind that at each individual municipality level would be extremely difficult."
University of Michigan professor and a victim of last week's power outage Seth Guikema believes at present, utility companies are doing the best they can, but there is still room to improve their response time.
"Inevitably, we will have outages and utilities have to have a robust validated to outage forecasting capabilities, so that they can have those mutual aid crews ready to go as soon as that event hits," Guikema said.
Meanwhile, Wyandotte Municipal Services is exploring ways to generate electricity through alternative ways as they work toward being self-sufficient.
"We had the big blackout a few years back. We were at the mercy of everyone else," he said. "So we have diesel powered generators that will fire up, and we can fire the powerhouse still."
