More than half a million homes and businesses remained without power across southern Michigan on Friday night after an ice storm battered the region and officials warned electricity may not return for many until Sunday.
On the other side of the country, forecasters said a storm was set to drench Southern California and pummel higher elevations with blizzard conditions and heavy snowfall.
Flooding, downed trees and damaged power lines were likely into Saturday morning as the storm moves across the state, the National Weather Service said.
In Michigan, nearly 600,000 utility customers were in the dark Friday, with outages reported from Lake Michigan to Lake Erie, according to Poweroutage.us. Across much of the region, temperatures were expected to dip into the 20s overnight and plunge into the teens with the wind chill, the National Weather Service said.
Light snow was expected in much of the area, the agency said.
In Lansing, city officials initiated a “code blue” cold weather response plan, with libraries, community centers and other buildings repurposed as warming centers. In Lenawee County, county officials also opened warming centers and the Red Cross was operating a 24-hour shelter.
Officials told Kalamazoo residents to prevent frozen pipes by opening cabinets around their plumbing and running a “pencil-lead sized” stream of water from a faucet if their indoor temperature plummeted below 32 degrees.
In Jackson, south of Lansing, resident George Ellis was outside cooking on a gas-powered grill while a generator provided enough power to keep a refrigerator and a space heater running, NBC affiliate WILX of Lansing reported.
When the station asked how he and his wife were doing, he responded with a single word: cold.
Garrick Rochow, chief executive of the state’s largest utility, Consumers Energy, said Friday that the majority of the company’s customers would see their power restored by Sunday. Rochow described the utility’s response as “all hands…
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