Residents Rack up Bills, Lose Fish During Power Outage

After the power shut off in above-90-degree weather last week and Carl Larson's house started to cook, he uprooted his fiancée and 4-month-old child to the Atheneum Suite Hotel in Detroit for three days.

"It was a mini, unplanned vacation," the 28-year-old Ferndale resident said. "It was unplanned and not all that much fun."

Like many Ferndale residents left without power, Larson was forced to adapt and shell out cash on additional expenses. The hotel visit and additional expenses, such as food lost in the fridge, cost him around $700. 

He said his fiancée is seeking to get back some of those funds from insurance and a reimbursement from DTE Energy.

Much of  and, for some, didn't . About 6,000 Ferndale residences and businesses were without power at the peak of the nearly three-day power outage in the middle of a weeklong heat wave.

In response to a Twitter prompt, other residents also emailed Ferndale Patch to describe what they lost in the outage.

Ferndale resident David Cooke emailed Friday, saying he took his wife and 20-month-old child to a hotel Wednesday night. Beyond the expense of paying for the room, he said a "punk kid" at the hotel stole his wife's brand-new iPhone. On top of that, when he went to replace the phone, he was informed by AT&T staff that she was ineligible for an upgrade, so he had to pay the full price of the iPhone — $700.

In addition to the $230 he spent on the hotel, Cooke said he was not pleased with his mini-vacation.

“In addition to all the normal stuff, like all the food in our fridge that will have to be thrown out and replaced, I am also out about $1,000," he wrote in an email.

Another Ferndale resident, Benjamin Moy, emailed Friday telling Ferndale Patch that he had been "migrating" to different houses to avoid the heat, but the aquatic life in his 125-gallon saltwater reef aquarium didn't have that luxury.

As of Friday, his Tomini bristletooth tang, which he had owned for five years, had died, and two mated black ocellaris clownfish and a sea anemone were looking weak. When he factored in the ongoing heat wave and power outage, in addition to the toxins created by dying fish, he estimated many more of his aquatic life would die.

"Even more than the cost of the loss (of the fish) is the emotional impact," he wrote. "I'm not as attached to my fish as my dogs obviously, but the clownfish and anemone had been with me for seven years, and there is a certain pride and attachment that comes with maintaining them that long."

Still, others simply lived with the heat.

While 33-year-old Ferndale resident Jamilya Williams stayed at her house through three days without electricity, she realized on the first night that her dog, Poppy Girl, could not.

Her power first went out around 6 p.m. Wednesday, but when it briefly returned four hours later, it took an hour in the air conditioning for an overheated Poppy Girl to stop panting. So Williams sent her dog to the residence of Angie Potter, a Ferndale resident who owns Waggs 'n Wishes Animal Rescue, an animal shelter that recently moved from Ferndale to Ann Arbor.

Meanwhile, Williams toughed it out at home. She slept in her office downstairs, and after three nights she developed swollen ankles and heat rashes in her inner thighs. 

Williams said she was immensely relieved when her fan sputtered to life Saturday morning, blowing cool air into the house for the first time in days.

But during the time she was without power, she felt oddly nostalgic for her childhood in the small Newaygo County town of Bitely, where her family enjoyed few amenities.

"It makes me feel like a kid again," she said. "We didn't have AC when we grew up. We had one TV, no computers and one microwave."