Many In Stanislaus County Left Confused, Waiting For Power Outages
STANISLAUS COUNTY (CBS13) — The impact of the second round of PG&E shutoffs was felt in Stanislaus County on Wednesday evening.
CBS13 was in one community where the lights were supposed to go off, leaving a lot of people confused about why they were still on.
As whipping winds tossed around tarps and dragged along dust in Stanislaus County communities like Patterson, Grayson and Westley, people were confused about whether they would be impacted by phase two of PG&E's Public Safety Power Shutoffs.
"I got messages yesterday or the day before yesterday, a text from PG&E," Rudy Galvin said. "I went to the website and it listed all the counties, but everything was 'to be determined, to be determined" so I got no information."
PG&E initially scheduled the power shutoff for noon but delayed it by several hours because of changes to the weather forecast.
Tracy resident Marco Garcia said he came to his shop in Westley with big plans to work on an old 64 Chevy.
"A lot of sanding, but if the power goes out there goes my compressor so I won't get that done," Garcia said.
If the electricity goes out at the Mexican Market on Highway 33, a worker said the store could lose most of its perishable foods. But just a few miles away sat Joe's Travel Plaza off Interstate 5, service manager Michelle Carson said a backup generator will power the pumps, run the register, and keep food and drinks cold.
"Our problem is that our well is off-site, so we're not going to have water," Carson said. "When we don't have water, we can't prepare food, we won't have restrooms, we won't have showers."
That causes a huge inconvenience for the nearly 1,500 truckers who pull in to fuel up, shower and eat every day.
"We have Dickey's BBQ back here, they're going to be completely out of business. Denny's completely out," Carson said. "there won't be any restaurants and then there's the hotels."
Just like most PG&E customers, businesses there were told the power could be out anywhere from 48 hours to several days.
You can check the latest PG&E outages here. As of 9 p.m. Wednesday, the map did not show outages in Stanislaus County.