(WWJ) Tens of thousands of people in Southeast Michigan are still doing without lights or air conditioning after Friday night's storms knocked out power to about 400,000 DTE Energy customers.
Crews worked all weekend, and have made quite a bit of progress.
As of 9 a.m. Monday, DTE said there were about 80,000 homes and business still impacted.
Officials with DTE Energy said there were areas where ten to 12 power poles were snapped and had to be replaced.
Communities Downriver, especially hard hit, but large pockets of outages remain across Metro Detroit.
Speaking live on WWJ Newsradio 950, DTE Energy Director of Operations Jerry Tullio said some people won't have power restored until Tuesday.
He said he understand how much this is affecting people's lives.
"First I want to start with just acknowledging, you know, how difficult it is to be without power; especially in some of the heat and weather conditions we've had," Tullio said. "And, you know, we're working as hard as as fast as we can to restore everyone."
"You know, the winds came through kind of unexpectedly on Friday, and we're just feeling a tremendous amount of tree damage, as was mentioned on air here," he said. "The trees do impact the roads; they also impact the power lines. Very large, old trees came down on our infrastructure, and we're working to clear those out of the way, get the lines back up and restore power to everybody."
Tullio said DTE currently has thousands of line workers from 12 different states and Canada working around the clock on restoration.
Efforts were delayed a little bit Sunday due to another sound of rain and thunderstorms.
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