DTE working to restore power to thousands in the dark
who's are working around the clock tonight as parts of Metro Detroit remain without power. Thank you for joining us. I'm Pamela Osborne for some tonight is shaping up to be yet another night without having power. At last check nearly 237,000 DTE customers are without power over 113,000 consumers energy customers are also without power tonight. Jacqueline Francis joins us live from Westland. One of the areas hard hit by this week's ice storm Jacqueline Francis. Pamela, that's right.
If you see behind me that intersection, the traffic light is still out. It's being treated as a four way stop. And just beyond that, those flashing lights are DTE and it's partnering crews. And that is a good sign because we've been talking to people in the neighborhood and they've about had it. They've been staying in hotels, throwing away their food from their fridge, bundling up throughout the night. Safe to say they are ready to have the lights come back on. For the third day in a row, this Westland neighborhood has been in the dark homeowners like Karen Lanue doing whatever it takes to be comfortable.
We have a wood burning stove in the garage. So we've had to stay there for the last few nights. And you know, it's hard. It's like 40 degrees in the house this afternoon. DTE trucks were spotted in their neighborhood. I saw a couple of trucks here earlier, but then they just left and that's not back on. So, you know, we're concerned this morning.
The company gave an update on the restoration efforts in total over 8000 wires came down and over 630,000 customers have been impacted. They expect to have the power restored for the vast majority of customers by Sunday evening. This is the worst ice storm our area has experienced in nearly 50 years. And from a number of customers impacted standpoint, this is already the second largest storm in our company's 120 year history. Still those in the dark one answers and reassurance this won't happen again. I have no idea how they planned that, but it seemed like they could have been more proactive of pulling more crews. I don't know.
They say they have a lot of crews out, but we haven't really seen too many around here. Again, the expectation is to have the vast majority of customers have the power back on by tomorrow evening. But the small percentage of customers that doesn't include they might not see power until Monday or Tuesday. And DTE says that's because they're tracking more winter weather moving into the area and that could set crews back reporting live in Westland tonight. Jacqueline Francis local for certainly a difficult wait for those families impacted by this outage. Jacqueline, thank you.
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