This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
David Nicholas: Thousands of people in northern Michigan are waiting for power to be restored following last week's historic ice storm. Some are potentially looking at two weeks without electricity going into the weekend. As of Friday afternoon, over 21,000 customers in northern Michigan are still without power, although most have been restored. Amid frustrations over the widespread outages, News Director Rick Brewer spoke with WCMU reporter AJ Jones about why power has taken so long to come back in some rural areas.
Rick Brewer: AJ, what can you tell us about the state of things right now, and where people can get help if they're in need of it?
AJ Jones: So, the utilities are still saying that thousands of people are in the dark, but they have made progress, Presque Isle Electric and Gas Co-op said they expect to have most of their customers back online by Monday, and from there they will deal with individual service issues. Great Lakes Energy Cooperative says they expect all their customers to be online by Sunday. People can call 2-1-1 for help with food and shelter. They can also contact local officials for more info on relief.
RB: Can I get some perspective on the scale of this ice storm?
AJ: A number of people up north have said this is a historically bad ice storm. Governor Whitmer declared a state of emergency and has since asked for a Federal Emergency declaration. Over 145,000 customers up north were offline at the peak of the outages. Gas shortages were happening in some places. Presque Isle Electric, as well as Great Lakes Energy have fixed over 2000 utility poles since the storm. Thousands of mutual aid crew members from across the state and other states have come in to help.
I spoke to Andrew Zaccagnini: with the Oakland County incident management team. They were sent to assist disaster relief in Montmorency County. He said, this is one of the largest disaster response efforts in state history.
Andrew Zaccagnini: This is one of the largest state responses we've ever seen related to a natural disaster. Obviously, we had things like COVID that were quite large and such, but for a natural disaster like this, this is one of the largest state responses we've ever seen in Michigan.
RB: Some folks, especially in rural areas, AJ will be facing nearly two weeks without power this weekend. The question many people are asking why is this taking so long?
AJ: So, a lot of these co-ops are smaller member owned organizations that rely heavily on mutual aid when big storms happen. This was a huge storm, that caused deep damage to energy infrastructure. Trees get knocked down, ice weighs down power lines, that causes broken utility poles, and you need to fix them to get power flowing. PIE&G have also said that they had to get their transmission back on, you know in the early days after the storm. They told us that they replaced about 500 Poles a year and they've replaced over double that number in a week. PIE&G CEO Allen Berg put it this way…
Allan Berg: Power flows from a central nerve, and it goes out to people's homes. The closer you are to the central nerve, the faster your power is restored. The farther you are, the longer it takes. But every time you hit a broken pole; the flow stops.
RB: So one of the questions that's now emerging AJ is, how do we improve power reliability in these rural Areas?
AJ: So that's difficult because processes like burying electrical wires underground cost a lot of money. I spoke to Professor Joydeep Mitra, Electrical Engineering Professor at Michigan State University. He described how that impacts billing for small co-ops.
Joydeep Mitra: If in a rural area where customers are sparse, you invested in underground lines at very high cost, it would add significant amounts to the customer’s bill.
AJ: There are some things that can be done, the professor talked about tree trimming for example. In terms of long-term solutions, he mentioned, you know community generating stations which are smaller systems that can act as a sort of localized backup with closer, potentially underground lines with members splitting the costs. Although, he said that also comes with its own expenses and red tape.
RB: AJ Jones, thank you so much for your reporting on this. We appreciate it.
AJ: You're welcome.
