East Lansing residents sound off at a community forum over the response by the Board of Water and Light to holiday break power outages.
During winter break about 34,800 people in the Lansing area went without power when an ice storm hit the area late last month, some staying dark through the holidays and the new year.
At Hannah Community Center on Wednesday night, the Board of Water and Light, or BWL, had a chance to answer community questions and explain their process for restoring power.
Four BWL officials sat at the podium, including BWL General Manager Peter J. Lark, who opened the meeting with an apology.
“You are our customers,” Lark said. “We did not meet our customers needs.”
He said all the answers are not yet known, but the final report will be available sometime in mid February.
“Answers will come when we have done a thorough review of how we handled this historic, and painful, outage,” he said.
After the meeting, Lark declined to answer additional questions from The State News.
After apologies from the BWL, citizens delivered heated comments for almost 2 hours.
Residents concerns centered around the lack of urgency in restoring power, lack of an emergency plan, the small number of workers and the fact that during the storm Lark was on vacation in New York City. Some residents called for Lark to either resign or be fired.
“I think he (Lark) should step down and be a man,” East Lansing resident Manuela Webster said after the meeting. “But who is going to take his place? Someone else will get appointed just like him.”
Webster said she and her family lost power through the new year. She said that crews from out of town had to come in and help her get power, but the crews weren’t provided an outage map.
“We drew them a map on a piece of paper,” she said. Webster said the crew members were very nice and helpful but should have been provided a map.
Webster said her trust in BWL has been permanently damaged.
“I don’t think I can ever trust them again,” she said. “I don’t trust the leaders, I think someone from each district represented should be on the board.”
Some residents have been critical of East Lansing city government’s response as well, something that East Lansing resident Christine Root thinks is unfair.
“It’s BWL’s responsibility to get the equipment working again,” she said. “They (East Lansing government) started quickly and kept going until the end.”
BWL will have two more community sessions in Lansing and Delta Township. The Delta Township meeting will be on Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Delta Township Administration building and the Lansing meeting will take place on Friday at 7 p.m. at the REO Town Depot.
Editor’s note: This article has been changed to reflect the correct estimate of Lansing area residents who lost power.
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