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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Power back after Detroit outage

Associated Press

DETROIT – 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 announced at 5:15 p.m. The outages happened around 10:30 a.m.

Mayor Mike Duggan said 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 spending hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading the system over four years.

The city’s electrical grid has been plagued by aging power transmission lines, which have failed under the stress of high demand and heat in particular. Power to downtown has been lost on several occasions in recent years.

“This is a case where a part of the old system that hadn’t failed before failed,” Duggan said, “Every month that goes by, we’ll be more and more on a more modern system and the likelihood of this happening will go down. But it’s part of rebuilding the city.”