History of power outages riles metro Detroiters, DTE promises fixes

Bill Laitner | Detroit Free Press

After suffering for days through last year’s historic power outage — the worst storm-related blackout in DTE Energy’s 150-year history — one resident of Royal Oak figured he’d had enough.

“I just couldn’t take it anymore,” said Chuck Semchena, 65, a lawyer and the former Royal Oak city attorney.

Like countless others across DTE Energy’s sprawling service area of 7,600 square miles, Semchena — who has lived in his house near Woodward and 13 Mile for 30 years — broke down and bought a generator. Actually, he bought three.

For his 95-year-old mother Genevieve Semchena, who also lives in Royal Oak, the dutiful son bought not one but two portable power units. They got them just in time to duck two more serious outages this year — an ice storm in mid-April that knocked out nearly 400,000 DTE Energy customers, then a wind-blown outage in early May that left another 300,000 customers in the dark.

The power to Chuck Semchena’s home was interrupted five times this year alone, as confirmed by DTE Energy at the request of the Free Press. Some interruptions lasted several days. Although his mother’s neighborhood fared better, Semchena is taking no chances.

“Now, if anything happens, I’m running back and forth between the two houses, keeping these things filled with gasoline,” Semchena said of the generators.

For DTE Energy, short-term power outages are an everyday occurrence, inevitably happening somewhere, according to the giant utility, Michigan’s biggest energy supplier. On average, the company sustains two outages a day just from drivers losing control and knocking down utility poles. That instantly triggers dead circuits for anywhere from hundreds to thousands of customers, although usually for just a few hours, managers said.

Yet, prolonged outages in 2017 and this year have stunned many longtime residents of southeast Michigan. They rattled state regulators as well, beginning when more than 1 million of Michigan’s utility customers — including those of Jackson-based Consumers Energy — went without power in 2017 for as many as eight days. Already this year, utility customers have endured fresh bouts of widespread, multi-day outages. (Note: The term “customer” is misleading because it means not one person but one electric meter, so that a single customer can be a family of six or a factory of 600.)

DTE Energy on Friday filed a detailed report with the Michigan Public Service Commission on its recent outage history. Officials are "concerned that parts of DTE's distribution system during large storms is unable to provide safe and reliable service, as is required by law," the agency said. The Public Service Commission has the power to investigate utilities, and to sanction them with fines and other penalties.

“We’re looking at all of the reasons around these service interruptions — we think it’s important to take a deep dive on that,” Public Service Commission spokesman Nick Assendelft said.

More stories:

High winds cut power to record-setting 1M in Michigan

Hundreds of thousands without power as outages span metro Detroit amid winter storm

Along the leafy Woodward Avenue corridor of southeastern Oakland County, some community leaders said DTE Energy's outages seem to be out of control, more frequent and longer-lasting than ever.

The big utility’s bosses dispute that, insisting that the Woodward corridor has an outage history no worse than many parts of the company's widespread service area, and better than some. Still, many of the area's residents and business owners said they’ve suffered to their limit.

Shower seekers

Not far from Semchena lives Tiffany Mason, 33, of Clawson, who bought her 1948-built bungalow in 2015, loving the neighborhood’s big trees, Mason said. Then came the outages.

Mason counts five this year. DTE Energy’s review of her address, conducted at the request of the Free Press, said there were four. Either way, it’s too many for Mason and her fiancé, she said.

During the April ice storm outage, “We had a whole protocol — where we took our showers, what we did with the dog, so she didn’t get too cold because she’s a senior.

“It got down to 45 degrees in our house. You’re wearing hoodies. You get headaches. And when it gets this frequent, you can’t keep imposing on relatives,” Mason said. When the power came back on after one outage, her headaches continued. The surge damaged the home’s central air conditioning.

Business owners, too, said they’ve felt chronic outage pain in the Woodward corridor. In early June, an outage closed the doors of numerous Royal Oak restaurants for a night. In Berkley, April's massive ice storm shuttered the Berkley Common, a downtown bar that lost power for three days, said co-owner Chris Gross. As bad as that was, it was worse to check DTE Energy’s app and believe the company’s ETR — the Estimated Time of Restoration — she said.

“If someone could’ve given us good information, it wouldn’t have been so bad,” Gross said. “First, they told us Sunday night. Then it was going to be Monday at 11:30 p.m. Then I got a text that said 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. It still didn’t come back.

Related:

Top 5 tips for dealing with power outages

Power out? Here's what to do with those refrigerated foods

“Our food storage only has a certain life. Then you have to reorder and it takes a couple of days (for delivery). We had to throw everything out and cancel several events. We just didn’t trust the app anymore,” Gross said.

The concerns raised by Woodward corridor residents and business owners are part of an overflowing stew of issues that DTE Energy wants to take off the burner and cool down, said Trevor Lauer, president and chief operating officer of DTE Electric, the utility’s electric side. (The huge company also is a major provider of natural gas to Michiganders.)

“For that lady who owns the bar, I certainly feel bad. Our goal always is to reduce the number of outages and the duration of outages,” Lauer said.

Shocking weather

For decades, the company has set a high standard for reliability, or uninterrupted power. For years, it scored among the nation’s best electric providers in reliability, and it won awards for other measures of operating excellence, according to the New York City-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

But after the placid years of 2015 and 2016, weather-wise, the company was slammed by an unprecedented series of weather jolts, in 2017 and again this year. That sent DTE Energy down to the bottom 25% in rankings for the duration of its outages. The utility in 2017 saw its customer interruption index — the average time per outage — more than triple, to nearly 13 hours.

Much of the cause was Michigan's increasingly high winds, sometimes accompanied by ice storms. Could the underlying culprit be climate change? No one can say. Across the nation, though, utilities have recoiled for a decade from storms of escalating intensity, including bigger hurricanes, as well as unprecedented wildfires and more mudslides.

In Michigan, “all we know is that our system was not designed to withstand 70 mph-winds,” Lauer said. On March 8 of last year, those high winds snapped 1,000 utility poles and darkened Lauer’s own house in Bloomfield Hills. He intentionally does not have a generator, he said, not wanting his family to get power back any sooner than the company can restore it.

The utility is ramping up its efforts to “storm-harden” its grid of power distribution against escalating wind speeds, he said.

In addition, DTE Energy is committed to improving the outage advisories on cell-phone apps and on the company’s website, as well as replacing aging utility poles and substations. A new $48-million substation was recently built to serve Ferndale. Birmingham also got a new substation last year.

State of disrepair

Is it Royal Oak’s turn for a major utility upgrade? Mayor Mike Fournier thinks so.

“As of early May, I’ve been asking for information on outages in Royal Oak, especially the ones that seem to be non-weather-related — it can be a beautiful day and the power goes out,” Fournier said.

After residents complained at city meetings several years ago, Fournier and other officials requested that DTE Energy send someone to explain. At the time, “they made a commitment to us that this was going to get better, and I don’t think it has,” he said.

In Huntington Woods, persistent outages were too much for Josephine Leider and her family.

“We just installed a whole-home generator at a great cost and pain to us,” Leider texted the Free Press. She’d viewed an invitation to comment posted on the newspaper’s new Woodward248 page on Facebook.

"After six days in the dark and freezing cold with no power last winter, stressing about being broken into or having water pipes bursting, we finally just bit the bullet" and spent more than $5,000, she said.

“I’m done living in fear each time the wind blows or the rain freezes,” she texted.

So is Woodward worse off than other areas?

DTE Energy points out that it's an area of older homes, which mean that power lines are overhead — not buried underground, as they are in subdivisions built after about 1970 — and the tree growth is dense. All of that makes the power supply highly susceptible to tree damage. Still, when compared with similar areas around metro Detroit, Oakland County's Woodward corridor is no worse, the utility's experts believe.

"We would not call them a vulnerable area," Lauer said.

"What isn't helpful is social media" riling people up, he said, adding: "When you run a big system, you can't just react to the noisiest people."

'Don't spare that tree'

As for utilities trimming trees, DTE Energy's forestry policy seemed for years aimed at keeping tree lovers happy. The policy backfired, according to the utility's own Five-Year Investment and Maintenance Plan, submitted to Lansing in January.

“Based on extensive bench-marking with other utilities that have better reliability and system performance, DTE Electric has taken steps to update its tree trimming specification,” including a push to take down entire trees outside the company's right of way if they threaten overhead wires, the company said in the 227-page document.

DTE Energy asked for the same level of tree-trimming it had in 2017 plus an extra $5 million "to address a 10% increase in the number of trees trimmed year over year." Public Service commissioners agreed, stating in their order dated April 18 that spending more on trimming trees would pay off for years to come.

So the company now has more funding to expand forestry work in the Woodward Avenue corridor. This week they were in Berkley near 11 Mile and Coolidge, removing tree limbs likely to touch wires in a storm.

Yet, in 2016, DTE Energy fielded numerous complaints after it introduced more aggressive tree trimming. Among the complainers were elected officials in Royal Oak and Bloomfield Hills residents represented by attorney Geoffrey Fieger. That kerfuffle prompted the utility to drop the new tree policy’s grandiose name, Ground to Sky, changing it to the tepid “Enhanced Tree Trimming Program.”

Of course, a downed tree by any other name is still a stump. On DTE Energy’s Facebook page, a writer from Milford recently registered a time-worn plea: “We need to stop the utility companies from ruining our landscape and destroying our trees.”

The utility won't remove an entire tree without getting a signed permit from the property owner, said Heather Rivard, a senior vice president in charge of electric distribution for DTE Energy.

"We used to trim to what is called a clearance circle, kind of a tunnel around the wires. Now the shape is more of a ‘U' because we're removing the overhang over the wires," Rivard said.

Moreover, the trimming now goes out for 15 feet instead of 10 feet from the center line of poles and wires, and DTE Energy is fully removing many more entire trees than it once did, Rivard said.

An outage epicenter

Berkley City Manager Matt Baumgarten lives in the city he runs. Baumgarten knows full well how intense the outages can be, and the resulting outcry.

"There's an area north of 12 Mile — they've had seven outages in the course of 12 months, some of them three or four days at at time," he said.

But the utility is replacing poles, upgrading equipment and trimming trees, including many in Berkley this week.

"It's a story of competing interests," Baumgarten said.

"I'm looking out the window now and I'm seeing the tree canopy. It's lovely to look at. But it hides a lot of wires and a lot of potential trouble."

Contact blaitner@freepress.com