By Dean Vaglia
Leader Staff Writer
A severe storm rattled Oxford and Addison townships on the night of Wednesday, Sept. 22, knocking out power for approximately 2,000 area residents according to a DTE Energy outage tracker.
The storm came in late Wednesday and damaged utilities with heavy wind.
“We had some gusts of at least 40 mph in Oakland County, and I’m sure many people noticed some twigs and leaves were down,” Steve Freitag, National Weather Service meteorologist in White Lake, said. “In Oakland County we had anywhere from 2 -6 inches of rain — six inches being closer to Farmington/Farmington Hills and … 4.45 inches [around Pontiac].”
The Oxford Fire Department responded to two calls regarding downed power lines, including one where a tree caught on fire.
According to a statement by DTE, 136,000 customers had electricity service disrupted by the storm and 77,000 customers remained without power Thursday morning. Line worker crews from Ohio, New York, Tennessee and Canada were brought in to help restore power throughout the DTE system.
While some power was restored to customers in Oxford by Friday afternoon, estimates posted on the DTE outage tracker expected power to be restored for most Oxford-Addison area customers by Friday or Saturday night. Power was restored to most area residents by Monday morning.
DTE says to stay 20 feet away from fallen power lines and to treat all downed lines as though they are live. Downed lines should be reported to DTE and the fire department.
“We are getting into fall; you’ve got to expect these deepening low-pressure systems that track through the Great Lakes,” Freitag said. “There will certainly be more strong-wind episodes this fall.”