Grand Rapids Residents Woke Up to StopLight Outages Across City Monday Morning

Update: as of 5:23am, power has been returned to lights and stoplights across the city. A big thank you to all of those who worked hard in the late-night hours to fix the problem!

It's Monday, and this is basically the most Monday thing humanly possible- Residents across Grand Rapids are waking up this morning and seeing that their street lights and stop lights in the neighborhood are entirely out, without warning.

Around 1am, residents started to report that they noticed stop lights and street lights going out across the city, and as of 5AM on Monday March 24th lights are still out throughout the city. The reported area affected goes from Burton to Leonard, affecting all of Downtown Grand Rapids, as well as several neighborhoods in the city.

On my commute in from Burton and Eastern, to all the way downtown, I didn't see a single light working. However, I did see several people blow through the lights without stopping.

The city posted on social media earlier, saying that it is aware of the outages and that crews are out working on them as quickly as possible. They hope to get things fixed before morning commutes pick up and slow things down even more.

Why are all of the Stoplights Out in Grand Rapids?

As of this time, there is no word on what caused the outages, but it's not the first time it happened over the weekend. On Saturday morning, residents near and along Burton also lost signals for a majority of the morning.

While there no real significant storms overnight, there were some powerful winds after the rain storm came through, which may be to blame for this, but to be honest- it's too soon to know for sure if that was the cause or not.

What should you do if you come across a stop light that isn't working?

If the lights aren't flashing, you should always treat an intersection without functioning lights as if you are at a four way stop. If no one else is at the intersection, you may proceed with caution.

We'll keep you updated as this develops throughout the morning.