As DTE drew nearer to restoring electricity to all customers who lost power on Friday, the utility’s top executive acknowledged the hardships that the prolonged outage caused while vowing that DTE will use the event as a learning experience.
“I want every customer to know that we will learn from this event,” said DTE President and CEO Joi Harris during a press conference Tuesday inside DTE’s Electric System Operations Center.
In April, DTE requested a rate increase of $474 million, or about 9.96%, just two months after the Michigan Public Service Commission approved a separate $242 million rate hike. Harris said the money gleaned from those rate hikes will help DTE replace aging infrastructure and take other steps to improve reliability.
“At the same time, I recognize that these improvements are not happening fast enough for customers who are experiencing repeated outages,” she said. “I hear their frustration, I understand it. Know that we are focused on getting you back in power.”
About 400,000 DTE customers lost power Friday when severe storms swept across southeast Michigan. Officials with the utility said the suddenness and widespread nature of the storm, as well as the fact that it struck during a holiday weekend, affected DTE’s response.
“When we have advance warning, we stage crews and we have them waiting until the storm clears,” Harris said. “We did not get the severe weather warnings until, like, 90 minutes before the storm actually hit.”
Because the storm knocked out power to communities across the Midwest, DTE had to bring in additional workers from states as far as Texas, which added to restoration times, officials said.
The storms coinciding with the July 4 holiday weekend left DTE ill-equipped to respond to outages, said Brian Calka, DTE senior vice president of distribution operations. He said while DTE had around 4,000 crew members working on Tuesday, only about half that many were available immediately after the storms hit.
“A lot of people were not around to work,” he said. “They had vacations, they had plans. So our crews’ strength was a little bit limited here on our property.”
Harris acknowledged that the $42 per day credit mandated by the MPSC does not cover all the losses incurred by customers who had to throw out medication or entire refrigerators full of food.
“The $42 a day, actually, does not cover (everything) being spent. It’s not intended to,” she said. “The focus we have is on preventing those types of events we have altogether.”
Harris said DTE would take a “hard look” at its response to the storm in order to weigh possible investments like burying more powerlines underground and “better tools” so the utility can more effectively predict and respond to severe weather events, “where the cost benefit analysis supports it.”
The utility expected to have power restored to all customers affected by the weekend outages by the end of Tuesday.
As of 3:45 p.m., 19,190 DTE customers were without power, according to the company’s online outage map.
Harris said DTE placed an emphasis on helping its most vulnerable customers, including senior citizens, the chronically ill and low-income residents.
“We conducted wellness checks. We’ve distributed more than 175 generators to support the most vulnerable, particularly those who are relying on life sustaining medical equipment,” she said.
mreinhart@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: DTE vows ‘we will learn from this event’ as power outages linger
Reporting by Max Reinhart, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Max Reinhart, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
