Thousands of electric customers in Berrien County remained without power Tuesday following Monday’s thunderstorm, which caused widespread damage throughout southwest Michigan and northern Indiana.

Power outages peaked at more than 30,000 across Indiana and Michigan following the storm, but that number decreased to a little less than 20,000 by Tuesday morning, according to Indiana-Michigan Power.

Just more than 6,000 were without power in Berrien County Tuesday morning, including many businesses along the South 11th Street corridor in Niles Township. That number has dropped to less than 3,000 Wednesday morning.

Indiana Michigan Power estimates that power will be restored to Niles and Buchanan by 11:59 p.m. Thursday.

“Many will be restored prior to that but we expect the last person to be back on by this time,” said Erica Putt, company spokesperson, in an email.

Jeff Dunlap, utilities director for the City of Niles, said Niles had a few localized power outages Monday as a result of the storm.

“Many of our customers may have seen a momentary ‘blink’ in their power, where our system detected a fault and was able to clear itself,” he said. “The few isolated outages affected less than 100 customers and resulted from flying tree branches contacting our distribution lines, or secondary circuits.”

Dunlap said crews were able to restore most of the power within an hour with a few of the “larger” situations requiring up to several hours.

“This reliability speaks to our continued effort in upgrading our electric infrastructure and managing potential ‘trouble spots’ before actual situational outages may occur,” Dunlap said. “None of the outages were the result of sub-transmission faults, which would have resulted in wide spread outages.”