Crane falls on west Michigan power plant
The Jackson-based utility, a unit of CMS Energy, said the 300-foot crane boom fell onto a building that houses the complex's Unit 3 power plant recently.
Neither the crane nor the plant were in operation at the time, according to officials.
There were about 100 Consumers Energy employees and contract workers in the building at the time of the accident.
One person was taken to a local hospital and later released.
"We've initiated an investigation to determine the contributing factors to the accident," said Dennis McKee a spokesman for Consumers Energy. "There were high winds and I'm sure that the speed of the wind will enter into our assessment of what the contributing factors may have been."
Unit 3 is in the middle of a routine outage for the installation of emissions control equipment.
"We don't know what impact this will have on our outage schedule," McKee said.
Operations at Campbell Units 1 and 2 were unaffected and those units continue to generate electricity.
The Campbell Complex is a coal-fired electric generating facility comprised of three power plants capable of producing up to 1,440 megawatts of electricity. That's enough power to meet the residential, commercial and industrial needs of about a million people.
Consumers Energy provides natural gas and electricity to nearly 6.5 million of Michigan's 10 million residents in all 68 Lower Peninsula counties.
Related News

Quebec and other provinces heading toward electricity shortage: report
MONTREAL - Quebec and other provinces in central and eastern Canada are heading toward a significant shortage of electricity to respond to the various needs of a transition to renewable energy.
This is according to Polytechnique Montréal’s Institut de l’énergie Trottier, which published a report titled A Strategic Perspective on Electricity in Central and Eastern Canada last week.
The white paper says that at the current rate, most provinces will be incapable of meeting the electricity needs created by the increase in the number of electric vehicles and the decarbonization of building heating by 2030. “The situation worsens if we consider carbon…