Consumers Energy officials said crews this weekend were completing power restoration to the final customers affected by severe weather that impacted hundreds of thousands of people last week.
The utility company reported the largest number of customers affected by the Saturday and Sunday, March 29-30, storms that officials said left about 390,000 people in the dark, for days in some cases.
“We are incredibly proud of our crews and support teams who responded swiftly and tirelessly during this critical time,” Norm Kapala, a Consumers Energy official, said in a statement. “We know how important reliable power is to our customers, and we thank them for their patience as we worked to bring everyone back online.”
A Consumers Energy online outage map showed less than 800 customers statewide were without power as of 11 a.m. Sunday, April 6. It’s unclear how many of those customers lost power from last weekend’s storms.
Consumers Energy officials said crews in the coming days will continue to work to remove downed utility poles, wires and materials used during the week-long restoration effort.
Officials with the utility company reported residents and businesses in several communities provided support to restoration crews, including at Pellston General Store, about 25 miles south of the Mackinac Bridge.
Andy Snider, Consumers Energy executive director of electric operations, in a statement said the store clerks there did not charge restoration crews for goods.
“When we arrived and set up our command center, there was no electricity, no water and no food available,” Snider said. “This establishment really opened its doors to help our crews out. The support they’ve offered helped us expedite restoration.”
Consumers Energy was not the only utility company with customers affected by the severe weather, which began with ice storms in Northern Michigan on March 29 and continued with a line of high-wind storms and tornadoes that swept across much of the state March 30.
At the height of the storms’ damage to utilities, tens of thousands of customers lost power on grids operated, respectively, by Great Lakes Energy along western Michigan, DTE along eastern Michigan, and Presque Isle Electric & Gas Co-op in the northeast corner of the state’s lower peninsula.
Four people died as a result of the March 30 weather event.
Three children in Kalamazoo County died when a tree fell on their vehicle. A man was killed in Ingham County when a tree fell on a home.