According to The Detroit News, officials hopes that a four-year, $200 million upgrade to the city’s decrepit power grid will help avoid more system-wide shutdowns like one that occurred Dec. 3, resulting in forced evacuations, people being trapped in elevators and hospital rooms and public buildings being left in the dark.
The massive, widespread outage was yet “another reminder of how much work we still have to do to rebuild the city,” said Mayor Mike Duggan.
The Detroit News further reported:
The city and DTE Energy are in the early stages of the project to update the city’s electrical grid, which hasn’t been modernized for decades. DTE is paying for the upgrades during an 18-month inspection of the system. Work began in July; when the transition is complete in about four years, DTE will run the system and the city will be out of the power business.
“Everybody is aware the system has not gotten the attention it needed over the past several decades because of the city’s ongoing financial problems,” Randi Berris, DTE Energy spokeswoman, told the paper’s online edition. “One of the key reasons why this migration is happening is because DTE can provide the reliability and affordability to the customers that are on the (Public Lighting Department) system.”
