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(FOX 2) - A dangerous heat wave over the weekend came to an end with a series of severe storms, which knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of customers in the metro area. It's the second largest outage in the company's history.
As of 3:45 p.m. Tuesday, DTE Energy is reporting that 53,000 customers are still without power. In a tweet sent out Tuesday afternoon, they expect to restore remaining outages by the end of the day tomorrow. A total of 600,000 people were affected by the outage.
Some have been without power since the storms on Friday night. Heather Rivard, the senior vice president of Distribution Operations, says those outages were concentrated in western metro Detroit, from Ann Arbor up to Howell. Then on Saturday when the second, larger storm came through the outages became more widespread.
Crews are working 16 hour shifts trying to get power restored. DTE says more than 1,100 employees and contractors are in the field and nearly 750 workers from as far as Georgia and New York were called in.
DTE has also repaired nearly half of the more than 2,000 wires downed. If you see a downed wire, assume that any fallen line is energized and stay at least 20 feet away.
Jackson, Michigan-based Consumers Energy says it's on track to have all of its affected customers back with power by the end of the day Tuesday. The number affected was as high as 220,000 due to the storms, but that declined to about 7,100 by Tuesday morning.