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Fall and Wintry Mix Causes Power Outage

Posted at 9:02 PM, Oct 24, 2013
and last updated 2013-10-24 21:10:05-04

ALLEGAN County, Mich. — Thousands of Allegan County residents are happy to have power in their homes again. It was a much different story this morning. A Consumers Energy spokesperson said more than 6,000 homes lost power today.

Doug Hornback’s home in Fennville was among them.

“This morning or so my wife woke up about 8:30 or so my wife heard a loud noise outside. She noticed about half of the pole, where electricity comes in, had gotten pulled off,” Hornback said.

About three hours later, Hornback said his home in finally lost power.

“I assume when it was rubbing against that pine tree, that it shorted out there,” he explained.

A tree service did the dirty work by freshening up his landscape. One home after the next had experienced the same scenario.

“One of the things that we saw this morning, was because of all the leaves being on the trees yet, the weight of that wet snow was causing a lot of limbs to be broken. A lot of trees were being uprooted,” Captain Frank Baker, with the Allegan County Sheriff’s Department said.

He said some of those trees fell into the roadway.

“It wasn’t uncommon this morning to have reports of people sliding into trees or people trying to drive around trees or over trees, reaping havoc on the west side of the county,” Baker explained.