ROYAL OAK, Mich. (AP) — Crews from two of Michigan’s largest power companies worked Wednesday to restore power to more than 300,000 homes and businesses left in the dark. hot, humid conditions after severe storms caused trees and branches to fall onto power lines.
More than 320,000 Michigan homes were without power late Wednesday morning, most of them in the central and southeastern parts of the state, according to PowerOutage.us. DTE Energy reported more than 200,000 outages and Consumers Energy reported more than 108,000.
In the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, resident Michael Zaccardelli said he heard about the approaching storm on Tuesday evening and decided to pull his car off the road. Just 15 minutes later, a tree in his front yard fell right where his car was parked.
“It would have been a total loss. Everyone is safe and just grateful that no one was hurt,” said Zaccardelli : WXYZ-TV.
While Consumers Energy employees worked to restore power, the utility said it would distribute water and ice to residents in the cities of Midland and Rockford. The company said about 360 utility employees were “working around the clock to restore power.”
“We appreciate people’s patience as Tuesday’s storms wreaked havoc on one of the hottest days this summer. Our focus now is to get the lights back on while making sure we provide comfort and relief to our friends and neighbors,” Norm Kapala, one of Consumers Energy’s recovery officers, said in a statement.
Severe storms also toppled trees and damaged homes and cars in the Chicago area after two days of heat that reached a record 99 degrees (37.2 degrees Celsius) at O’Hare International Airport on Tuesday, surpassing records of 97 degrees (36.1 degrees Celsius) set in 1948, 1953 and 1973, said Brett Borchardt, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Chicago.
The overnight storms also brought hailstones the size of tennis balls to parts of McHenry County, in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, ending the heat wave in northern Illinois, Borchardt said. A cold front moving through the area on Wednesday will reinforce that cooler trend by bringing lower temperatures and humidity.
“The heat wave is over and we expect cooler temperatures and lower humidity today. Yesterday was the worst part,” Borchardt said.
Heat warnings were in effect Wednesday for the St. Louis metropolitan area, parts of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia, and the Mid-Atlantic region. The weather service predicted that “many daily high temperature records could be broken.”
Severe thunderstorms were expected throughout the Ohio Valley, the northern Mid-Atlantic coast and parts of North Dakota and South Dakota on Wednesday.
In the central Pacific, a trio of tropical storms — Hone, Gilma and Hector — should weaken, with the remnants of Gilma and then Hector bringing much-needed rain to Hawaii by the weekend, according to the National Weather Service in Honolulu. No tropical storms were in sight in the Atlantic on Wednesday.
