Morgan Hill Imposing Wednesday Night Pedestrian Curfew In Wake Of Power Outage
MORGAN HILL (CBS SF) -- Morgan Hill city leaders announced Wednesday that they would be enforcing a curfew to protect home and business owners from looters once the power outage goes into effect in the city.
"We don't want a bunch of people loitering around businesses that are closed," said Morgan Hill Police Sgt. Bill Norman.
The curfew would only be enforced in areas that are impacted by the outage, which is north of Dunne Avenue and west of Highway 101, and would end on Thursday at 6:30 a.m.
The looming fate of losing power caused several business owners to close up shop early in Morgan Hill, including Craft Roots and Opa!
"We decided to closer early, around 6:30," said Opa! server Kat Lernihan.
The restaurant, which normally closes at 10 p.m., has a generator like many other nearby restaurants to keep their food from spoiling. But Lernihan said the loss they will experience will be in their wallets.
"I'm a starving musician so I need to work," she said.
PG&E is expected to shut off electricity to a third of the city including downtown Morgan Hill and the industrial zones to the north.
"My first thought was, 'Is the town going to get looted because of the power going out?'" said Morgan Hill resident Lisa Glanville.
She said while she welcomes the curfew, she doesn't welcome PG&E's decision to cut electricity, which she acknowledged is in turn cutting into thousands of wallets across the Bay Area.
"They're trying save their business by affecting the business owners and homeowners and I think this is going to do a lot more damage than if they just left the power on," said Glanville.