SOUTHFIELD, Mich. (WXYZ) — People who live in the Magnolia subdivision in Southfield are fed up. The neighborhood is north of 8 Mile, between the Lodge and Southfield freeways.
They’re now asking DTE Energy to come out and survey their area to find out why their power has gone so many times.
“9 times since June!” says Allan Watson.
“It’s been a whirlwind mess!” says Emerson Rogers, who has worked at home as an attorney and lost power for a week in August.
He adds, “It was odd. We didn't have power. Across the street had power. Prior to that, I think it flip flop where they didn't have power. And we did.”
Last month DTE Energy gave some customers $100 credits for being out so long. The utility also took heat from state officials.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer told 7 Action News today, “it's critical that we rebuild our electric infrastructure our power infrastructure as well as broadband. All of these are important pieces now.”
DTE has said they’ve had so many outages because of several intense storms this summer, well above the norm. And they are aggressively trimming trees that are the cause of many of these outages bringing power lines down.
Many of the people have lived in Magnolia for 30 or 40 years and they want DTE to survey their older infrastructure and why this is happening so much.
Allan Watson says he called DTE, “And I said I would really like someone to come out into the neighborhood, you know, other than the repair crews who either an executive or manager who can walk the neighborhood and see the condition.”
Ryan Stowe, DTE VP of Distribution tells 7 Action News they will come out here. “We want to look at the data and history and then we get our, our engineers and technicians to build up the plan that we're going to use so it kind of depends on the specific instance. But we're able to get back to that customer, we should be able to get back to the customer, very quickly.”
Stowe says they will do that within a day or two. But then a spokesperson clarified the work would be done within a day or two and it not would start immediately but soon.
Stowe also says as of Friday afternoon, 30,000 customers are still without power from the storms this week. They say 95% will be restored tonight.
