Residents in Berrien County without heat

On Wednesday at 4p.m. 684 customers in Chickaming Township lost gas to their homes. Residents were still without heat on Thursday as crews went door to door to turn it back on. 

 

On Thursday at 9a.m. 430 customers were restored. One lady who lives in the Shorewood Hills neighborhood said she used multiple space heaters to keep warm. 

 

Karen Orth said, “The roads were bad so I was more afraid to leave the house and the dog than I was to go out in the road then maybe go in a ditch!”  

 

66-year-old Karen Orth said she put anti-freeze in the toilet bowl to keep it from cracking. 

 

Orth said, "I had trouble lighting my fireplace and I thought it was a fireplace problem and found out my gas was out, and then the panic began!”

 

Orth said,“Burkette heating came here to help me and they were wonderful they left me 3 heaters to help save the pipes in the bathroom and the kitchen.”

 

Orth said she stayed awake in  case the technicians came knocking on the door in the middle of the night to turn it on. 

Orth said, “You couldn't fall asleep because you didn't know when they were going to come turn the gas back on! Every house had to have the gas turned off.”

 

Richard Ryden said Semco Energy accidentally skipped his home! 

 

Richard Ryden said, “My living room right now is 42 degrees.”

 

Semco energy spokesman Tim Lubbers said 30 crews came from across Michigan to fix the issue, 

 

Lubber said, “Natural gas is not like electricity, we can't just flip the switch and turn everybody back on. When we have a low pressure incident like what occurred, for a variety of safety reasons we need to isolate the system where this happened and we went through last night and physically shut everyone affected off. Then we were able to reenergize the system.”