Power restored to Detroit's municipal services after one-day brownout

DETROIT - Power to schools, police stations and street lights was restored Friday, the day after the city turned it off in some areas to avoid a repeat of the four-day outage that struck the municipal power system in June.

All power was restored Friday morning, though the city was still working to repair one tie-line, mayoral spokesman Greg Bowens said. With more hot weather due Friday, however, there was a possibility of a repeat of Thursday's outage, he said. School was not in session Friday, so that would reduce power demand.

''What we experienced yesterday is the plan. ... And that is to cut power to substations as needed to preserve the integrity of the system,'' he said.

The Public Lighting Department powers city and other public offices, schools, hospitals and Wayne State University. It also powers street lights and traffic signals. The city's 970,000 residents get their power from Detroit Edison, and that supply was not affected.

The city made the precautionary power cuts Thursday on the city's west side rather than risk a total crash of the system, officials said. More cuts were made later in the day as problems developed with generators and the tie lines that link the city system and the Detroit Edison system.

''What we have attempted to do is to get ahead of the curve, to shut down electricity so that we will not have a total outage as we experienced a number of months ago,'' Mayor Dennis Archer said.

The failure of tie lines June 13 shut the entire city electrical system down for four days.

City officials blamed Detroit's antiquated public power system for the problems. The mayor has asked the City Council for approval to buy six small quick-start generators and one larger generator at a cost of $51 million. The mayor also wants $3 million to add two more tie lines with Detroit Edison.

Those improvements should make this kind of power failure less likely, Bowens said.

''Hopefully, at this time next year, we won't have to deal with this again,'' the spokesman said.

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