Municipal electric service for street lighting, schools and administrative buildings came to a halt in June after the three transmission lines connecting the Public Lighting Department to Detroit Edison generation stations failed in a cascade collapse.
A few days before the outage, one of the three elderly transmission links failed. While the first link was being repaired the second failed and the consequent load on the third transmission link brought that to collapse also. Although most of Detroit, in Michigan, receives its service from Detroit Edison, a large number of public agencies receive their supplies from the municipal system. The outages lasted for several days.
