Power outages down to 25K in state

About 25,000 DTE Energy customers in the region remained without power Wednesday morning as the utility continued efforts to restore electricity after a weekend storm.

Company officials said power has been restored to more than 90 percent of its 390,000 customers left in the dark after Sunday's ice storm.

Tuesday night, the company reported 40,000 customers had no power. The number fell to 30,000 earlier Wednesday morning.

Officials also said the remaining repairs are among the most difficult because they're the smaller but more complex jobs to restore power to pockets of customers. Crews start first with critical health and safety facilities, like hospitals and police stations, before moving to repairs that will restore the greatest number of people as soon as possible.

About 1,600 workers from DTE Energy and five states are working to restore service, according to the company. They will continue working around the clock until all customers have power, officials said.

Another update on the number of customers without electricity is expected at 5:30 p.m.

Based in Detroit, DTE Energy has an electric utility that serves 2.2 million customers in Southeastern Michigan as well as a natural gas utility that serves 1.3 million customers in Michigan.

cramirez@detroitnews.com