Places where you can escape the heat cheaply
There are many indoor places you can cool off and keep yourself entertained that may not immediately spring to mind, like a swimming pool or the beach.
Extreme heat and severe thunderstorms triggered tornado sirens in Michigan on Tuesday and left hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power.
In addition to the heat and heavy storms, the weather service warned early Tuesday morning that there was a risk of destructive gusts of wind and even hailstone-sized precipitation.
“This was the kind of instability we see once or twice a year,” Dave Kook, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in White Lake Township, told the Detroit Free Press, a USA TODAY network website, on Tuesday afternoon as he watched the storms sweep across the state. “And now it’s here.”
As of 10 p.m. local time Tuesday, nearly 143,000 Consumers Energy customers in northern Michigan and the Grand Rapids area were without power due to storms. The utility promised to “work through the night” to restore power. Another 224,000 DTE Energy customers in southeast Michigan were without power.
DTE said in its online “storm update” that the utility was working to restore operations “as quickly and safely as possible” and was bringing in hundreds of additional employees “from outside our region” “to expedite recovery.”
Michigan power outage map
As of 7:27 a.m. ET Wednesday, more than 335,000 customers across the state were without power, according to a USA TODAY power outage tracker.
Nearly 79,000 power outages were reported in Oakland County and over 66,000 in Wayne County.
Contributors: Frank Witsil, Detroit Free Press
Gabe Hauari is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can follow him on X. @GabeHauari or email him at [email protected].
