PG&E customers in the Santa Cruz Mountains still without power after the storm Tuesday
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (KION-TV) -- Power outages are still affecting hundreds of people in the Santa Cruz Mountains following the storm yesterday.
Residents in the area saying that this isn't the first time they've been left in the dark for days. Now, some people are asking why this keeps happening.
"We're out for five days. We were out for three days before," said Boulder Creek resident Robert Autrand. "It just becomes very, very uncomfortable. We don't have heat [and] it's freezing weather."
Outages can prevent people from operating essential appliances like heating and food storage.
"The refrigerator doesn't run, so we lose food," said Autrand. "At one point, we had a surge that blew out a lot of our electrical equipment."
PG&E says that access to damaged areas can be challenging due to narrow roads, which causes repair delays.
"One road in Boulder Creek [had] five damage locations back to back, like one big tree came down, took down several spans of wires," said Stephanie Magallon a spokesperson with PG&E. "That's a significant amount of work, combined with how narrow the road is and the fact that we're only able to send one bucket truck up there."
Magallon said that PG&E crews can only send specialized trucks to those hard-to-get-to locations.
"It was two times yesterday. They got [the power] back on within a couple of hours and then it went out again and then back on within a couple hours," said Amelia a shop owner and resident of Boulder Creek. "In the past it has been weeks. It has happened before where it's been a long time and that's definitely tough."
PG&E says that the saturated soils helps to facilitate falling trees and power poles.
"Our soils are already saturated so it doesn't take that much wind to take down trees, take down limbs and other vegetation," said Magallon. "That's what we're seeing that is impacting our power lines, breaking our equipment and our power poles."
To speed up repairs, PG&E is using a technology called sectionalizers, aimed to help limit the number of people affected by outages.
"In Ben Lomond, there was an outage that initially impacted about 900 customers, but because we had sectionalizers there, we were able to quickly restore power and bring that number down to just 75 customers," said Magallon.
