Consumers Energy gives update on outages

then I which hindered our ability to quickly respond we had to wait for the storm to move through the area so we could get back out and do that uh we've seen over 2 600 down power lines at this point it's an extremely high amount compared to other seasonal storms um we're working very diligy to make sure that we get out take care of that and relieve our Public Safety officials that are almost down power lines safety is our top priority the safety of our team the safety of the public and the safety of the emergency responders that are out supporting us uh with that I'd like to hand it over to Greg thanks Chris in a restoration event of this magnitude we have a prioritization scheme that we use to be sure that we restore the most important things first for society in general we started with hospitals and critical Medical Care Facilities fire departments police departments water treatment plants broadcast media TV and radio stations for emergency communications and we're very sensitive to the fact that school has either started this week or will start next week for many school systems and we will be also prioritizing restoration of schools so that school can begin on Monday across the territory once these priorities are addressed we turn to the remainder of our restoration work and the residential customers across the system we rely heavily on our outage map and our mobile application to communicate with customers it's a valuable tool to help customers make the best and safest decisions during a power outage the colored shades of the shapes on our outage map indicate how many customers are impacted in a specific outage and in general the area of the outage once the outage has a crew assigned to it the map will show a green border around the shade that means that there's a crew who will be moving into that area as soon as they're complete with the work they may be currently working on elsewhere to evaluate the damage and begin to isolate repair and restore power it may take time for the outage to be restored and they may find more damage than they expected but as you see the green margin around the shape you can be sure that somewhere out there there's a crew who knows about your outage and is on the way to work on it and if you're out of shape doesn't have a green margin uh we know it's there and we're working to assign it in priority priority order like I mentioned before there's five steps in restoring power the outage gets reported either by a customer or through our automated system and at that time we start to calculate an estimated time of restoration which is what you'll see if you click on the outage in the shade we have Crews who are trained from our engineering staff to go out and assess damage and help us understand how much time it's going to take and how many crews will be required the crews have been dispatched and they arrive on the scene and the first thing they do is identify any hazards that need to be controlled for their safety as always the first and most challenging risk to control is traffic control so we ask that people who need to be on the roads are very careful and slow down and go around any Crew That's set up we use signs and we use cones but that's a critical aspect of having a safe and effective restoration the crews make the repairs and then they restore power to the line the estimated times of restoration are very important and we recognize that it means a lot to our customers and we work very hard to keep those accurate we know that some customers may experience changes to their estimated restoration times and that can happen as we find more damage than we might have thought or as Crews get busy with previous work orders they may have been working on and aren't able to arrive on the scene as soon as we estimated that they might we're committed to work around the clock with the extremely large numbers that Chris mentioned so that we are largely restored across the territory by late on Sunday in closing I want to thank everybody for their patience and their attention to the safety of our crews for storing power we are all hands on deck on this storm across the company you can report an outage or check the status of your outage by visiting consumersenergy.com outagecenter you can also sign up to get outage alerts and restoration times sent to a phone email or or through text message at that site we urge everyone to stay 25 feet away from hang down Powerline and especially to keep children and pets away and Report the issue by calling 9-1-1 and our Consumers Energy call center at 1-800-477-5050 we also ask that the public keeps a safe distance from the cruise because they may be working with live power while doing restoration thank you all for being here today and I'll turn it back over to Brian to facilitate q a thank you Greg thank you Chris um so we have some time um if there are questions from the group here the easiest thing to do to be put your hand up virtually um and I can call you out okay um how about uh Andy from cranes thanks Brian um I was just kind of wondering you know what uh consumers was sort of anticipating as far as the extent of the damage going into this and when you were sort of aware that these storms would be a significant as they were yeah Andy I appreciate the question you know we beat with a meteorologist three to four times a day when we see weather coming in and we've met with them Wednesday night and looked at ei2 level wins so gust up into the 50 55 mile an hour range sustained winds in the 35 and some thunderstorm threat when we got up Thursday morning that had moved to EI level fours with winds up to 75 and that's when we quickly started to go and secure additional resources make plans for that we brought on 213 additional Crews yesterday and as I mentioned earlier we went and secured an additional 300 Crews throughout the overnight and this morning as the magnitude came through so the volatility with the warmer Lake and what we saw we saw more damage than what we forecasted working with a meteorologist but we quickly made adjustments to get the resources here to restore safely thank you great thanks for the question Andy uh Maggie George hi um so I'm curious compared to the rest of the country if Michigan's like daily average power outages are higher than average and what the daily power outage average is across the country and how far back you have data for that Maggie and hope today actually if you were to check out a power outage.us you see that Ohio absorbed nearly the same amount of damage as we did from this system so during circumstances like this uh the electric grid is susceptible to these kind of winds and storms uh universally across the Great Lakes region thank you um Andy do you have your hand up again oh did I just put it down Okay um you'd be missing here I don't see any other hands that are up I'll take a moment here in case anybody has questions okay okay well it's Friday afternoon maybe a quiet Bunch anyone with any other questions at all here's your here's your chance okay well thank you all for your time really appreciate you being here today um as always you can stay in touch with consumers Energy's media relations team uh we'll be sending out our next company news release at 4 30 this afternoon uh with more updates and then again later tonight so we will be communicating today tonight through the weekend if you have any needs uh or questions uh don't hesitate to reach out to us uh thank you Greg thank you Chris for your time and I appreciate everybody being here hope it's a great afternoon thank you all foreign foreign [Music] foreign foreign