Aging Infrastructure Eyed in Detroit Power Outage

The city of Detroit found itself in the dark for several hours after a widespread power outage Tuesday. The blackout affected thousands of people.

The cause is still under investigation, but city leaders say Detroit's aging infrastructure is to blame.

Courtroom video of a murder trial shows the moment the lights went out in Motor City. There's a long flicker, and then the blackout.

The massive power outage brought downtown Detroit to a standstill; it cut power to 1,400 buildings, resulting in people trapped in elevators and emergency evacuations. Firefighters helped the elderly and disabled.

"They carried people down several flights of stairs," Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan recalled.

"There's essentially a sense of eeriness here in downtown," a news reporter described the incident in a live broadcast.

The power outage plunged schools throughout the Motor City into darkness, including Wayne State University.

Police and fire stations were also in the dark, while prisoners at the main jail were forced into lockdown.

"When the power went out we lost power to all of our stations," Detroit Fire Chief Donald Austin said.

Traffic light outages affected almost the entire city, causing gridlock.

Detroit's public lighting department says two cable failures are to blame for knocking out the entire grid.

"We're not certain what happened to the cable; that's something we'll have to investigate," Jerry Norcia, president of DTE Electric, said. "Certainly, I'm sure it's age-related."

In financially troubled Detroit, an aging infrastructure has been a concern for years. Detroit's mayor says the power grid hasn't been updated in decades.
 
The city is emerging from the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

"We will for another few years still at least have some risk of this happening," Duggan warned.

The power outage also is a reminder that the older American power grid could be vulnerable to terrorism.

"It's an ongoing battle to stay one step ahead of these folks who might want to do us some harm, not just physical harm to the power system, but also the cyber side," Clark Gellings, of the Electric Power Research Institute, explained.
 
The positive side in Detroit is that the system that went down only affects public buildings; the rest of the city remained untouched.