Detroit residents still dealing with outages days after July 4 storms knocked out power

Some Detroit residents are still dealing with the aftermath of last week's storms that knocked out power across the area, even as most customers have had their electricity restored.

Kenneth Nash, a Detroit resident, said he went without power and air conditioning for five days after the holiday weekend storms.

"I slept with the door open for five days," Nash said.

Nash said he also lost a significant amount of food during the outage.

"I lost all my food, $365 worth. We had just gone shopping. Everything in there was brown. It was smelly," he said.

Nash said his power came back on Wednesday afternoon. But some of his neighbors are still dealing with outages after transformers blew out on their street in the days following the storms.

"I had a fire. They put it out, but the box is not on. They got to hook everything back up," said Detroit resident Tyrone Dotson.

Nearby neighbor Jerome Record described a similar situation.

"Part of my home was out and part of it was still on. But the transformer in the back of my house blew up. It was on fire," Record said.

Crews shut power back off Thursday to finish repairs on those transformers and power lines. Residents affected by those additional shutoffs said crews told them the interruptions should last only a couple of hours while the work is completed.

Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield said she was disappointed by how DTE Energy handled the widespread outages.

"Like many Detroiters, I was disappointed. I have relatives whose power was out for days during the holiday weekend. It's not something we want in Detroit. We're going to continue to push for more from DTE," Sheffield said.