Tens of thousands of Michigan homes and businesses still without power after last week's powerful storms

DTE truck
Photo credit Kathy Kieliszewski / USA TODAY NETWORK

(WWJ) -- There are tens of thousands of people who still don't have power following the severe weather that rolled through Mid-and Southeast Michigan last week.

At the height of the outages on Friday, DTE Energy was reporting more than 200,000 of its customers were without power, while Consumers Energy they also had around 200,000 customers without electricity, for a total of more than 400,000 outages statewide.

As of Sunday, nearly 50,000 DTE customers were still offline in Southeast Michigan after a reported seven tornadoes hit the state on Thursday night.

Monday morning, DTE was reporting nearly just over 19,000 outages, with some of the bigger pockets in Monroe County.

According to the DTE outage map, some of the areas hit hardest by outages by the storms included Ann Arbor, Livonia, Ypsilanti, Belleville, Farmington, Farmington Hills and Redford.

DTE's Bill Hutchinson, speaking live on WWJ Sunday morning, said more than 2,500 DTE employees, contractors and out-of-state linemen were in the field over the weekend, working hard to get power restored.

Hutchinson said this round of storms brought some of the worst damage he has ever seen.

"For example, in one of our South Lyon neighborhoods, there were 35 broken poles and hundreds of downed trees," he said.

Clearing those trees, along with traversing flooded roadways across Metro Detroit made efforts difficult for DTE after Thursday's chaos, Hutchinson said.

In a previous interview with WWJ, DTE Vice President Joe Musallam detailed the restoration process.

"They have to figure out what the damage was, and then they have to take some time to make sure that the wires are deenergized and safe," Musallam said. "And once they're safe...then the linemen can proceed to work on it."

"Simultaneously right now we're also deploying hundreds of damage assessment and public protection personnel to make sure both our wire downs are covered and we're starting to get a sense of where damage is, so we can get our customers good estimates," he said.

Consumers Energy officials, meanwhile, said crews from Kentucky, Alabama and Pennsylvania were headed to Michigan to help.

Consumers said over 1,000 lineworkers and support teams would be working around-the clock.

By Sunday evening Consumers was reporting about 52,000 customers still without power. By Monday morning, Consumers Energy was showing more than 33,000 of their customers were still without power.

Featured Image Photo Credit: Kathy Kieliszewski / USA TODAY NETWORK