Update: Power restored at Clovis mobile home park for seniors after two-day outage
UPDATE: Power has been restored to The Woods mobile home park in Clovis.
According to a tweet from the City of Clovis, power was restored to the community at 11:08 p.m. Tuesday. Residents had been without power since early Sunday morning.
ORIGINAL STORY: A power failure that left a mobile-home community of senior citizens in Clovis without electricity for more than two days was expected to be fixed Tuesday afternoon.
Residents at The Woods, a community of 260 mobile homes for residents ages 55 and older, reported that power to the entire park went out early Sunday morning after hearing a couple of loud bangs, and remained out as of Tuesday morning.
The park is located near Barstow Avenue and Highway 168.
A spokesperson for Pacific Gas & Electric Co. told The Bee that electrical equipment owned by the mobile home park failed at about 5:45 a.m. Sunday. A crew from the utility company was sent to the mobile park by about 6:30 a.m. and determined that the faulty equipment would need to be repaired before PG&E could restore power to the community. Because the equipment is privately owned by the mobile home park, responsibility for the repairs was up to the park’s management.
PG&E spokesperson Denny Boyles said that the repairs to the park’s equipment by electricians had been completed by 11 a.m. Tuesday. But the utility company needs to inspect the equipment repairs and check for any collateral electrical damage to its own system before turning the power back on – a process that could take into late Tuesday afternoon or night.
Boyles added that the situation at the park is like a single outlet failing in a home that affects other equipment. “It cascades from there,” he said. “You can’t always just flip it back on.”
Millennium Housing, a Costa Mesa nonprofit that owns the mobile home park, and its property management company Bessire and Casenhiser Inc. in San Dimas, issued a statement Tuesday afternoon that they remain uncertain about when power will be back on.
The statement attributed the power outage to a possible “rain-related problem with a transformer” on the property. “After working through the night (on Sunday night), our transformer was repaired by 2 p.m. on Monday, at which point power could have been restored.”
The companies said PG&E was having its own equipment issues, “so even though our side was ready to go, PG&E was not able to provide power to the park.”
Residents at the park said they’ve gotten mixed messages from the park’s managers about when power would be restored. Ellen Elrich, who has lived at The Woods for 15 years, showed a series of text messages first promising that the electricity would be back on on Monday. On Monday, another text message in the morning said that repairs to the park’s equipment had been completed at 7 a.m. and that PG&E would energize the system by about 4 p.m.
“PG&E and the park are pointing fingers at each other, but that’s not helping all the tenants day to day right now,” said Michele Falk, whose mother-in-law Marie Atteberry lives at The Woods.
Falk said Atteberry had to throw out all of her food in the fridge and has been staying at a family member’s home while the power remains off. “Who is going to reimburse these seniors for the food and medicine that they’re losing?” Falk asked.
Beverly Stith, a 12-year resident at The Woods, said the loss of the groceries wasn’t the only inconvenience. “I had lamb chops in my refrigerator, and I had to throw those out,” she said. “And my popsicles all melted all over the freezer. It’s the mess now that we’ve got to clean up.”
A text message to residents from the park’s management said PG&E would be covering losses of refrigerated groceries that spoiled during the outage. Boyles, however, said that was not accurate.
“Most likely it will be the (mobile park’s) management because it was their equipment,” Boyles said Tuesday. “We would investigate claims and if it was not the fault of our equipment, it would be denied.”
Stith said the lingering outage is a bigger problem for residents who rely on medical equipment. “I worry about the old people,” she said. “They can’t see in the dark and they could fall, and some of them need machines for breathing.
Falk’s mother-in-law, for example, relies on an oxygen machine and has been using oxygen tanks while the power is out. “That has limitations as well,” Falk said. “Luckily she has that (oxygen tank) because otherwise she’d really be up a creek.”
Boyles said that the community is served by a 5,000-volt line running into the park; a series of step-down transformers at the park distributes the electricity to the individual mobile homes. The mobile-home park is considered a “master meter” account and is treated like a single utility customer.
This story was originally published November 2, 2021 at 1:22 PM.
