Mendocino: County seeing the light after days in dark
After five days of darkness, the lights came back on in Ukiah on Wednesday.
Residents switched off their flashlights, stopped feeding the woodburning stove and began planning for the important things in life, like the beloved tradition of trickortreating through the downtown business district.
Ukiah is the the county seat and largest town in Mendocino County, a 3,878squaremile chunk of Northern California that had been without power since Saturday night. That’s when — at precisely 7:07 p.m. —
Pacific Gas & Electric pulled the plug on just about the entire county. Ninety thousand people were plunged into the void.
“We’ve been promised power since Monday, and we have not received it,” said Carmel Angelo, the CEO of Mendocino County, who had been frustrated in her efforts to find out exactly when PG&E planned to turn the switch back to “on.”
Then suddenly, on Wednesday, all was as it should have been. Twothirds of the county regained power that evening, and with an “all clear” given by PG&E meteorologists, work was under way in the rest.
“It’s awesome,” said Mark Barrera, owner of the Food Depot market. “We were one of the only businesses to stay open because we had a generator. We had to struggle, but we made it. Now we are on to greener pastures.”
For five days, until Wednesday afternoon, no one in town knew anything for sure. Residents communicated chiefly by rumor. Meanwhile, supermarkets were closed, restaurants were closed, stores were closed, everything was closed.
The dialysis center was closed, too. Patients were sent 60 miles away, to another center in Fort Bragg, where the medical devices were working on emergency power.
What a difference one flip of the switch can make.
For days, residents had been trying to make the best of it.
At an old motel on the south end of town that had been converted to apartments, residents had stood outside their small units and tried to cheer one another up. The main pastime seemed to be picking lice from children’s heads — a minor lice epidemic hit town during the power outage — and that’s something that until Wednesday could be done only during daylight hours.
Lisa Wilson, a lice technician whose skills came in handy, had been sitting in front of the old motel and combing a kid’s head as fast as she could while the sun shone.
Her friend Briseida Rivas, 29, lives in her small unit with her three children, ages 10, 6 and 1. Rivas’ job as a homeschooling translator was on hiatus because the homeschooling program was, too.
Safeway, she said, had run out of candles, batteries and propane. The food in the refrigerator wasn’t going to last much longer. Rivas and her family had eaten canned tuna and chicken and hoped it would last.
Showers were taken carefully, she said. Water was boiled on a propane stove, mixed with cold water and then poured over the tops of heads.
Now her kids are again looking forward to Ukiah’s annual downtown trickortreating event, when businesses welcome children beneath the bright streetlights, and the candy haul is good. Had the town stayed dark on Halloween, the program would have been scuttled. And the children would have been crestfallen.
Across the parking lot, a woodburning stove had been a gathering spot for the small community of apartment dwellers. Luis Ornelas, 19, and his girlfriend, Kandy Elizarraraz, 22, boiled water on the stove just outside their front door. Ornelas chopped wood with a small ax and fed the stove.
While the power was out, the stove was a popular place.
“People (would) come over to cook, make coffee, warm up,” Elizarraraz said. “You get to know more people. It’s actually fun to be able to hang out with the whole family and not have everyone on their cell phones.”
Ryan Switzer, 35, who works with disabled adults in Ukiah, said no electricity meant, for him, no water. At his mobile home in nearby Boonville — where he lives with his wife, three children, two dogs, two cats and his wife’s two parents — he uses an electric pump to get his well water and keep his multigeneration and multispecies family going.
His boss let him fill water bottles at the office and take them home at night.
“It sucks,” he said. “My family is a little thirsty. I bring it back so they can cook and clean and flush the toilet.’’
For days, Switzer told his children the same thing he told his clients: Pretend you’re camping. Pretend you’re camping. Pretend you’re camping.
The weather has been pretty nice in Ukiah. Although the Kincade Fire was blazing 40 miles to the south, the winds seemed to be blowing the smoke the other way. Skies were blue and mostly clear. But during the dry days of fall, everyone in wildfire country is in the same boat.
At the north end of town, Leslie Smyth was short of breath. She uses an electric air compressor to help her breathe. Without it, it’s hard to fill her lungs.
For days, she heard the rumors about the power coming back on, but the rumors didn’t really help much.
“I take them all with a grain of salt,” she said. “PG&E has not been the most responsive to people, let’s just say.”
The first thing she planned to do when the power came back on was to switch on her oxygen concentrator and take a deep breath. She’d been relying on a portable oxygen tank and used two canes to maneuver herself and the rolling tank around her small house.
When she has power, Smyth paints religious pictures in her small studio while her 7yearold, Chihuahua, Pippin, watches. While the lights were off, she couldn’t see to paint.
The city called a couple of times to check on her, which, she said, was nice.
“This is a community that seems to work together,” she said — lights or no lights. Alone in the dark, a 77yearold woman does a lot of thinking.
“Life can be full of dangers,” she said shortly before the power was restored and pausing every few words to take a breath. “I’m worrying about oxygen. I could die. Is death something to be afraid of ? For me it’s not. What’s harder than that is the feeling of emptiness.”
But with the lights back on, Smyth can get back to painting, and the kids of Ukiah can gather up their candy, and Ornelas can put away his ax.