(WXYZ) — More than 200,000 people are still without power in metro Detroit after severe storms ripped through Southeast Michigan on Monday.
As of 6:15 a.m., the DTE Energy Outage Map shows more than 207,000 customers without power, many having to wait days until it will be restored.
According to DTE's president, they have to prioritize downed power lines because those pose the greatest threat. In Monroe, a 14-year-old was electrocuted on Monday, and in Warren, an 8-year-old boy was shocked after touching a live downed wire.
To start, crews were spending time marking those live wires, which put the restoration timeline back a bit.
After all live lines are addressed, crews focus on facilities with vulnerable populations.
"Health care facilities, nursing homes, places where you have gravely ill patients. You go to the largest outages so you're restoring those fast and you start to get the fastest numbers back," DTE President Trevor Lauer said.
Another approach DTE takes is to bring substations back online. Those service thousands of customers each, so once those are restored, power should come back relatively quickly, according to DTE.
The company said no area was really hit the hardest. The area that seemed to be spared from this round of severe weather was north of I-96.
In terms of a timeline, DTE said 80% of impacted customers should have power by the end of the day Thursday, with 95% restored by Friday.
