Scores of Michigan residents woke up without power for a fifth-straight day Monday morning amid brutal winter weather.
Over 150,000 homes and businesses remain without power as of 12:45 p.m. ET Monday from last week’s ice storm coupled with high winds, according to PowerOutage.US.
This comes as the National Weather Service (NWS) predicted that more wintry weather, leading to more ice accumulations, will hit parts of the state throughout the day Monday.
WINTER STORM CANCELS HUNDREDS MORE FLIGHTS ACROSS COUNTRY
The NWS office in Detroit tweeted that “widespread wintry weather” including snow, sleet and freezing rain, will move across Southeast Michigan late Monday morning and will last through the evening.
Ice accumulations up to a tenth of an inch are expected, officials said. A Winter Weather Advisory has been issued for parts of Southeast Michigan.
Meanwhile, crews have been working around the clock to restore power following the powerful storm last week which created one of the biggest outages utility company, DTE Energy, has ever seen.
DTE Energy spokeswoman Cindy Hecht said it was topped only by the March 2017 wind storm that knocked out power to about 800,000 customers.
DTE Energy reported nearly 3,000 downed wires and close to 500,000 customers without power right after the storm hit, according to a summary of the storm from the NWS.
After high winds on Thursday, more than 600,000 DTE customers were left in the dark at the storm’s peak.
“For many metro Detroit communities, an ice storm with this widespread of a footprint has not been observed since April 2003,” the NWS said.
WINTER STORM GROUNDS NEARLY 1,000 FLIGHTS, KNOCKS OUT POWER FOR THOUSANDS
Even though there are still tens of thousands of outages, more than 95% of DTE customers impacted by the storm have been restored by Monday morning, the company said.
“Crews will continue working around the clock to restore the remaining storm-impacted customers, as well as all other customers that have experienced recent outages,” DTE tweeted.
Meanwhile, the state’s other main utility, CMS Energy unit Consumers Energy, tweeted Monday morning that it’s finally “down to the most frustrating part of a big storm event. The small outages.”
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Following the storm, the company prioritized circuits that have emergency services like hospitals on them. From there, it move on to the circuits that have the most people out on them, Consumers Energy tweeted.
“Smaller circuits are just as important to us and the jobs on those smaller circuits take just as much time to complete,” the utility tweeted. “Sometimes they can be more challenging to restore, depending on how far poles are from the road and how much wire needs to be restrung.”
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.