(Photo: Elisha Anderson, Detroit Free Press)
Detroit officials fully restored power to downtown government buildings, schools, a hospital, traffic lights and police and fire halls Tuesday after a major cable failure caused parts of the city to go dark for up to seven hours.
All customers of the municipal power system affected by the outage had their power back, the city said at 5:15 p.m.
Mayor Mike Duggan says the power grid hasn’t been modernized in decades in Detroit, which is emerging from the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. DTE Energy Co. is taking over the department and upgrading the system.
The outages knocked out electricity to most public buildings, trapping many people in elevators and cutting power to police departments, fire stations, schools, jails and traffic lights.
The “major cable failure” shut down the grid at about 10:30 a.m., according to a statement from the City of Detroit, affecting at least 100 major customers, such as the fire department, which have numerous individual facilities.
“We have isolated the issue and are working to restore power as soon as possible,” according to the statement by the city.
Source: USA Today | Robert Allen and Elisha Anderson, Detroit Free Press and Doug Stanglin
