During the month of August, Michigan saw a large influx of severe storm weather.
Many people were out of power for the better part of a week.
Some had to endure almost 90 degree heat during blackouts.
The state is now making sure customers are covered when it comes to paying their electric bills.
More than 300,000 people across Michigan lost power.
“370,000 folks lost power in mid august,” said Josh Paciorek, Consumer’s Energy Spokesperson. “Another 90,000 lost power about a couple weeks later and that’s really the severe weather systems that we saw moving through with, you know, 60, 70, and sometimes 80 mile an hour winds.”
Consumers Energy says the damages from these stormed caused a portion of their customers to be in the dark—some for an entire week.
“There was nearly 8,000 wires that came down nearly 1,600 poles that needed to be replaced. The destruction left behind by the storms was catastrophic,” said Paciorek.
Attorney General Dana Nessel is making sure those who were left stranded by the power outages will be protected in the future.
“I need to know the very real human cost of these power outages because it will better help us going forward to understand what we have to do and how we have to make sure that Michigan residents are properly compensated,” said Nessel.
With many utility companies charging more, the state is launching an investigation into how companies are spending their money.
“We want to know exactly for all these rate increases that you’ve had—what exactly have you done with that money?” said Nessel. “How many trees have you trimmed?”
Consumers Energy says that they plan to spend $5 billion dollars over the next five years to make sure their customers don’t see as much of a frequency in these types of outages.
The state is also looking into how they can help prevent the high number of power outages in the future.
Attorney General Nessel will be holding townhall meetings to ask community members how their utility companies can better serve them in an outage.
For more information from the Attorney General’s office,.
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