DETROIT (WXYZ) — DTE says it’s been monitoring the looming weather pattern for four days. The company says it expects customers to be impacted late Monday evening and into the early hours Tuesday morning.
With winds as fast as 70 miles an hour in the forecast, residents in Detroit’s Rosedale Park neighborhood say they are nervous but better prepared if it takes out the power and internet having gone through a storm just recently.
"What will be different tonight is that if the storm will be in the middle of the night, everybody's going to be home. They're going to be in their beds," Rosedale Park resident Jackie Laughlin said.
A city contractor made rounds clearing branches from Rosemont Avenue, which was hit by a strong storm on June 1. Laughlin says she was home when it happened in the afternoon.
“It was like ‘(The) Wizard of Oz,’ Dorothy and Toto. It was terrible,” Laughlin said as she gave 7 Action News an impromptu tour of the block. “You see all of that’s exposed? None of that could you see before.”
Fallen trees caused property damage and power outages.
“We kept thinking the power was going to come back on right away, but it didn’t,” Laughlin said.
She says she had to sit in her car to charge her phone. But knowing another round of storms could be headed her way, she says this time, she’s ready.
“Now we have battery-operated radios, solar chargers for the phone. So, I could probably go another two or three days without power,” Laughlin said.
Her neighbor Carl Teesdale, who spent the afternoon moving more debris from his backyard to the curb, says he's got a generator on standby if it comes down to needing to use it.
“It’s nothing I can really do… we got two big trees in back of me. I’m hoping that nothing happens,” Teesdale said.
DTE says it plans to shift all field resources to take care of downed wires and customer power outages as storms pop up.
