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Thousands Still Without Power In Wayne County

HAZEL PARK (WWJ)- About 5,000 DTE customers are still without electricity Wednesday morning, though most should be back on today. Many of the outages in Wayne County with Hazel Park and Redford the hardest hit.

DTE's John Austerberry said even though they're bracing for a few more days of high energy demand, their system has held up well for 2.1 million customers.

"Our system is designed to maintain, to meet the demand for power on the hottest days of the year and our plants and distribution system has performed well so far, with just some scattered outages and low voltage," he said.

Austerberry does have some advice to take some of the stress off your air conditioner these next few days.

"Nudge up the thermostat on the air conditioning to about 80 degrees when you go out the door to head to work and then you might only need to put it back down a couple of degrees to be comfortable when you get home," he said.

He adds that you can also help by waiting until the evening to run appliances that pump heat and humidity into your home.

"Those that put heat back into the house, like your dishwasher, washing machine, things like that, wait until after 9:00 when things have cooled off a bit and then your air conditioning doesn't have to work as hard," Austerberry said.

DTE hopes to have power restored by Wednesday evening and expect to be able to handle electricity demand the rest of the week.

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