Hundreds Of Thousands In MI Without Power After Severe Storms

MICHIGAN — More than 200,000 Michiganders are without power Friday morning after overnight storms slammed the state.

The majority of the outages, 187,000, were Consumers Energy customers along the Lake Michigan coastline in west Michigan. There were also outages along a band from Kalamazoo to Ann Arbor.

Kalamazoo County had the most outages, with 50,142, according to the utility.

In southeastern Michigan, DTE Energy reported more than 9,500 outages. Most of those outages were in Genesee and Livingston counties.

Midwest Energy and Communications, which is based in southwest Michigan, reported another 6,900 outages.

Consumers Energy said more than 500 crews and other Michigan contractors were working to restore power to homes and businesses.

"We recognize that many communities will be waking up to the impact of this tremendous storm system, and our commitment is to help them recover," said Chris Wisniewski, one of Consumers Energy’s Officers in Charge for this storm. "That means we will be putting every available resource to work today, ensuring we safely and quickly restore power to customers who count on us."

The powerful line of storms brought heavy downpours, 70 mph winds, large hail and tornado sightings.

The National Weather Service had active tornado warnings for parts of Kent, Montcalm, Eaton, Allegan, Ionia and Barry counties Thursday night. Tornado warnings were also issued in Bay, Ingham County, Livingston, Midland and Saginaw counties just after midnight.

As of Friday morning, the weather service had not yet confirmed if any tornadoes touched down.

Forecasters expect more strong storms to hit Michigan during the afternoon and evening hours Friday. They warned those storms can produce heavy downpours, large hail and winds up to 55 miles per hour.

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