DETROIT — City crews worked all night to restore power to parts of downtown Detroit on Friday after days of 90-degree heat caused aging transformer lines to fail, shutting down electricity to municipal and court offices, a convention center, university campus and traffic signals.
Officials ordered City Hall and several other public buildings to remain closed Friday, and city and county employees at the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center were told not to report to work.
“That will be the last building to get power restored,” mayoral spokesman Dan Lijana said.
Three of the five transformer lines at the aging Mistersky power plant in the city’s southwest, which provides power to downtown and other parts of Detroit, began to overload and shut down Thursday afternoon.
Workers and visitors at City Hall, Cobo Center and other buildings were forced to leave. Traffic signals through the heart of downtown shut off, snarling traffic heading into the evening rush hour.
The outage did not affect most residential power customers because the municipal system largely serves public buildings. The plant is owned and operated by the city.
Some power from the Mistersky plant was expected to be restored Friday, Lijana said.
Traffic lights still were out in the morning. Services out of City Hall, including Wayne County Circuit Court civil hearings, were cancelled. No criminal hearings and other services were to take place at the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, according to Maria Miller, spokeswoman for the Wayne County prosecutor’s office.
Classes at Wayne State University were cancelled Thursday afternoon through Friday.
Temperatures in Detroit topped 90 degrees earlier this week, peaking at 95 on Tuesday and easily topping the upper 70s average high for this time of year, according to Dave Kook, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Oakland County’s White Lake Township.
City officials had been monitoring the high power output from the transformer lines and on Thursday asked users to limit the amount of electricity they were using, especially for air conditioning, chief operating officer Chris Brown said.
When it became clear the system was going down, a decision was made to shut off power to Cobo Center and the Coleman A. Young building to keep the remaining tie lines from overloading, mayoral spokeswoman Karen Dumas added.
“Certainly the system is old and we can’t deny that. Over the past couple days, usage was higher than normal,” she said Thursday night.
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