GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Six out-of-state power companies are playing a big role in helping Michigan recover from Wednesday’s wind storm.
By Friday afternoon, only spotty outages remained across the state.
Mutual aid plans help utilities deal with large-scale outages like this historic one. But it’s getting difficult attracting line workers to do the everyday job of maintaining, inspecting and repairing electrical lines.
The average person leaning over the side of the bucket to fix your power lines is getting older, and the line of people to replace those aging workers isn’t getting longer.
Consumers Energy has just under 600 line workers.
“But were retiring quite a few of those. Our demographics don’t look like any other company’s. And you’ll see every couple of years, you’ll drop 25 percent of your line worker crew,” explained Dan Malone, Consumers Energy’s senior vice president of energy resources.
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