Just sickening. "Emergency Manager" in Detroit caused blackout during heatwave to teach a lesson....

[TorchTheWitch]

91. the only failure was not warning ahead of time

But there's always the possibility they couldn't do that either. This guy didn't just willy nilly shut down the power to "teach people a lesson". There was mechanical failure where they had no choice to do some shut downs or the remaining working infrastructure would have overloaded and huge swaths of the city would have lost power. It was a controlled shutdown to purposely preserve power for essential services. They did ask people to lower their usage voluntarily, but not enough did, so there was no choice but to do deliberate shutdowns in order to KEEP power for essential services.

This article makes is seem like he just shut down service for no reason even though they cite the original article which is here...

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/story/23415960/what-is-the-cause-of-detroits-power-outage

On Wednesday, Bill Nowling of Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr's office told Fox 2's Alexis Wiley:"The outages are precautionary measure while DTE and city crews work to fix two main lines in the grid that went down earlier today."

Nowling also said, "That city grid customers were asked to reduce power, but failed to, so we had to move intentional outages to protect crucial service."

City of Detroit Chief Compliance Officer, Gary Brown smiled as he talked to Wiley about the "intentional outages" on camera. Play the video to see the exchange:

Wiley: Did any of the customers get any notice that the power would be cut?

Brown: We did start calling our customers prior to taking them down and asking them to turn off air conditioners, but they weren't responding as fast as we would like them to so we had to send them a strong message by turning the power off.


Turning off power to buildings with elevators to send a message was still asinine without making sure that those elevators were cleared first.