More than 30 outages reported throughout city affecting 738
customers since Saturday; blackouts caused by transformer failures
due to heat and high usage
Morgan Hill – After several days of scorching temperatures, sure to be record breakers if the National Weather Service records for Morgan Hill are correct, relief is in sight beginning today.
But temperatures peaked in Morgan Hill on Saturday at 114 degrees. Sunday’s high of 112 degrees and Monday predicted high of 111 degrees sent residents into the pool, into air-conditioning areas, whether at home, movie theaters and stores or in the city’s designated “cooling station” at the Community and Cultural Center.
The triple-digit readings, however, are predicted to steadily drop, reaching between 87 and 89 degrees by Friday.
City Manager Ed Tewes established the temporary cooling station, which will be open from 10am to 8pm through Thursday, to give residents a safe place to escape the dreadful heat. It’s the first time the city has designated a place to keep constituents cool and happy.
Morgan Hill resident Elaine Loewenstein might be a candidate for the cooling station. She and her neighbors on La Jolla and La Mar courts have not had power since Saturday evening.
“It went out around 2pm or 3pm, then came back on at 6pm, and we were so happy, thinking it wouldn’t be so bad,” she said. “Then it went out again at 7:30pm and hasn’t come back on since.”
She said she and many of her neighbors in the west Morgan Hill community off of La Crosse Drive have lost freezers and refrigerators full of food. Many of the more than 100 families in the area have small children, she said, and there are several seniors in the neighborhood.
Many of the families fled to hotels, but not all could do so as they were full, she said.
“If it’s taken this long for the power to come back on, with just heat, we have to wonder how it would be during an earthquake,” she said. “Do we all have to go out and buy generators?”
Loewenstein’s neighborhood still did not have power by Monday evening.
Morgan Hill Police Special Operations Sgt. David Swing said Monday that
during the weekend, there was an outage in the area west of Del Monte Avenue, which included Pacific Hills Manor.
Officers on patrol are planning to do periodic checks on senior centers and nursing homes and areas where they know there are outages, he said.
“We’re trying to track what specific neighborhoods are affected; we know Woodland Mobile Estates is running on generator, we are checking in with local convalescent and senior care facilities, places that we know where people might be at risk for heat related problems,” he added. “We encourage people to call 911 if there’s an emergency, but to call our non-emergency number, 779-2101, if it’s not and leave 911 available for true emergencies. And we encourage people to check on their neighbors, be neighborly, especially if there is someone they know that might be particularly vulnerable to the heat.”
Jeff Smith, a spokesman for PG&E, said there were “31 separate and distinct outages affecting 738 customers.”
Though the utility has brought in crews from outside the area, Smith said, the sheer number of the different outages means that crews are hard-pressed to restore power quickly.
“There’s a lot of work going on, and it’s just taking us time to get to everyone,” Smith said.
As of Monday, there were more than 1,100 distinct outages in Santa Clara County, according to Darren Deffner, government relations representative for PG&E. The company brought in 400 additional crew members to the county to respond to the problems caused by the heat wave.
The primary cause of the problems has been transformer failures due to the physical heat and high usage loads, according to Deffner.
For updated information, customers can call 1-800-743-5000.
The power overload could have caused rolling blackouts, as the California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s power grid, declared a “stage two” emergency. If the level of usage compared to reserve power supplies reached critical levels, a “stage three” would have been declared, and involuntary power outages could have occurred.
Kristina Osbourne, public information officer for ISO, said Monday that though rolling blackouts were possible, she didn’t think it was likely.
“Many of our large consumers are curtailing power usage, and cutting out some usage altogether, and that has made a difference,” she said.
