In Detroit, Motor City, power outage means gridlock.

By Justin Hyde
363 words
14 August 2003
19:31
Reuters News
English
(c) 2003 Reuters Limited

DETROIT, Aug 14 (Reuters) - New Yorkers may have rushed into the streets when a power blackout hit a large swath of eastern North America on Thursday but in Motor City, people mostly headed for their cars.

The result was gridlock for thousands of Detroit commuters.

The tunnel that connects Detroit with its Canadian sister city of Windsor, Ontario, was shut down, and the nearby Ambassador Bridge spanning the Detroit River was clogged with vehicles, temporarily stranding thousands.

"Its just a really big mess. There's no gas in my car so I just have to wait," said office worker S. Shama, standing in the median near the tunnel entrance on the Detroit side.

Joe Lovins, superintendent of the tunnel, told waiting motorists they would be better off trying to cross on the bridge because the tunnel would be closed for several hours.

"You're dammed if you do and dammed if you don't," said Lovins. "You can be stuck here or stuck there."

Detroit does not have much public transportation aside from buses and a lightly used downtown monorail. So when the power failed in office buildings, people went straight for their cars. Many ended up sitting in their vehicles, listening to the radio and blasting the air conditioning to stay cool in one of the hottest days of the summer.

With elevators not operating at General Motors' (GM.N) headquarters tower, the city's tallest, workers had to to take the stairs.

Randy Richardson, waiting at a bus stop for a ride back to Detroit from his hotel job in the suburb of Birmingham, said the outage brought back worrisome memories.

"Since Sept. 11 happened, it kind of scared me. The first thing that came to my mind was a terrorist (attack)," he said.

A Detroit Edison spokesman, Scott Simons, said the utility's plants shut down when the East Coast outage cascaded westward. Restarting them could take 24 hours, he said.

"This is a very unusual event to have a service-area-wide outage. We've had extensive outages due to bad weather, but nothing like this," Simons said.

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