Santa Cruz County businesses make changes to be more prepared for next PG&E power shut off

APTOS, Calif. (KION) More than a third of Santa Cruz County was hit by last months PG&E power shut offs. Some businesses, like Aptos’ Clean Juice, lost power in two separate power shut offs for a combined three days.

In the power outages, the juice shop lost not only customers but also product. Money they can’t afford to lose as a new business.

“For those days we’re closed, we’re not getting in that money that we would have coming in normally," Clean Juice manager Hannah Rice said. "Especially we lost a lot of our cold press juices so without people buying those that’s quite a bit of product.”

The juice shop just opened in August and are still trying to create a name in Aptos.

“Three days may not seem like a lot out of a month but its pretty significant,” Rice said.

Following last months shut offs, the juice shop bought a generator that can power two of their large refrigerators.

Jason Hoppin, with Santa Cruz County, tells KION that Santa Cruz County has been added to the list of counties that could lose power this week.

On a large scale, the county experienced some issues they say need to be resolved.

“During the last public safety power shut off 22% of our cell sites were down in a shut off that impacted less than half the county. That's concerning, because if there’s one that would impact the entire county we’re looking at a widespread loss of communications infrastructure,” Hoppin said.

The county was granted up to $1.6 million after the shut offs to help improve their infrastructure.

“We think we did pretty well, but that will definitely help and determine how we’ll use that funding down the road with the cities and different jurisdictions,” Hoppin said.

Hoppin said the possible power shut offs this week could be of similar size to the first large black out, which left more than 50,000 customers without power.