“MDOT spokesman Rob Morosi said roughly 20 percent of the lights on poles and beneath overpasses on freeways in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and St. Clair counties are dark. ‘We are responsible for about 5,500 light poles and also about 5,000 individual lights that are installed beneath overpasses,’ Morosi told The Detroit News. ‘Right now we’re estimating 1,100 outages to those poles for a number of reasons.’ The main reason for many of the outages, according to Morosi, is copper thieves – who are stripping metal from the transformer cabinets.”
