This winter seems endless for many families, especially for those in the Santa Cruz Mountains who’ve been hit with extended outages with little-to-no breaks.
Some say they’ve had more blackouts than days with power in the past few weeks and PG&E says they’re preparing to respond by loading up substations that are near the neighborhoods, with all the tools they’ll need ahead of the storm.
“The mountain has hummed with generators for weeks,” said Julie.
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She and her neighbors in Los Gatos say they’re mentally ready if they get a repeat of last week: a storm with wild winds, extended blackouts, and lots of damage.
But at the same time, she says they’re fed up.
“Everything this winter is so expensive,” said Julie.
She’s constantly refilling her propane tank, servicing her leaking generator, and cleaning up all the tree damage.
“It's gone into like 12 grand for us, and it hasn't finished yet,” said Julie.
Two houses down, Mike Miller is still trying to fix a fence damaged by the last wind storm. And now he’s wondering if Tuesday's wind will leave them once more without power and water.
“Water company here is based on using a pump to deliver water to the uphill systems and that runs off of a generator that uses propane and propane deliveries are hard to come by right now,” said Miller.
PG&E says they’re learning from the past storms and doing what they can to prevent another round of extended outages.
“We’re going to be bringing in crews from other areas, last time around we brought in mutual aid, it's yet to be determined if we’ll need that at this point,” said Tamar Sarkissian of PG&E.
PG&E said they’re stockpiling equipment in their local yards and focusing on the South Bay, the Peninsula and the Central Coast.
“As these storms have been occurring we have been changing out our equipment and in a lot of cases we can harden the system,” said Sarkissian.
