Bay Area family freezing without power
When the overnight snowstorm brought down an 80-foot oak tree that narrowly missed Mateo Uriarte’s home in the hills above Los Gatos, he heard a crash and reached for the light.
It would not turn on. That was Feb. 24. The lights were still off Wednesday, as Uriarte, his wife, Christina, and their two kids, ages 11 and 14, have been without power for five days now and have been told by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. it will be back on Friday night.
“We’ve been living by candlelight and flashlight,” said Uriarte on Wednesday. “You can see your breath in my living room.”
He’s been seeing a lot of it because the living room is where the family of four sleeps, huddled together for the warmth of one space heater powered by a generator he was finally able to rent, for $75 a day plus $25 in gas to power it. It mostly keeps the refrigerator going. The generator outside the house is used only to power the heater when absolutely essential. On Saturday morning, it was 31 degrees in the living room.
“We are basically camping in our house,” he said. “If I didn’t have a good gas grill, we would be screwed.”
Uriarte is among 1,800 PG&E customers without power in Los Gatos, mostly in the unincorporated areas of Lexington Hills and Redwood Estates. As of 10 a.m. Wednesday, PG&E reported 3,538 customers still without power Bay Area-wide, with 2,803 of these customers in the South Bay region, meaning mostly Santa Clara County.
The Los Gatos hills are part of the Santa Cruz Mountains, but they are more suburban than the mountain areas over the hill in Felton and Ben Lomond. Uriarte lives on a suburban cul de sac and the homes are close enough together that at night, “you hear all the generators singing,” he said. But the serenade lasts only about four hours before the gas runs out. It is refilled by 5-gallon cans that are harder to find in the county now than generators for rent.
“We have to get up every four hours to refill and restart the generator or else we will freeze to death,” Uriarte said.
Like most Los Gatos residents, Uriarte, 52, is irked at the slow response of PG&E. After last Friday night’s storm, he hiked 50 feet down his street and saw a power pole down. A PG&E crew came out and put orange cones around it, he said. But the crew did not return until Tuesday.
“They pushed us back twice on the restoration time,” he said.
Tiring of the wait, he went to Home Depot and was able to rent one of the last generators he could find.
In a statement, a PG&E spokesperson blamed the weeklong outage on difficulty accessing downed power poles and toppled trees.
“In these locations at higher elevations, we did not have access to our damaged equipment due to the snow or wind-related damage which resulted in dozens of downed trees breaking our power equipment,” the spokesperson said. “The area with the most impact, on Black Road in Los Gatos, we have multiple power poles down, dozens of toppled trees, hundreds of limbs on power lines and equipment, and many spans of wire that snapped after being struck by vegetation.”
In an effort to expedite repairs, Black Road, on the north side of Highway 17, will be closed to all traffic from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday and Friday.
So it will be at least two more nights huddled in the living room for the Uriarte family. The only salvation is that the schools reopened Monday, though it took an extra day to work out the logistics.
“We literally had to boil hot water on the grill so the kids could do a sink bath,” said Uriarte who was back at work Wednesday as an administrator for the Santa Clara County hospital system.
“This is their first exposure to snow. I keep telling them it is usually a lot more fun.