Nevada City residents still in the dark from recent storms, but taking advantage of weather break to get errands done
NEVADA CITY - Thousands of people in Nevada City have been without power since Tuesday morning and are preparing for more snow to come this weekend.
The shining sun Wednesday has allowed more people to be out and about to stock up on the essentials.
"I ran out of food the other day," said David McDaniel who lives in Grass Valley. I mean I have food to eat, but I need food to eat you know what I mean."
Many people spent hours shoveling snow off their cars to get to the grocery stores today. Gregory Thompson lives in Nevada City and said his car had been stuck for over five days.
"We just survived a mini blizzard we will call it," said Thompson. "We have a generator and gas for heat, so that has been a big blessing."
He has extended this blessing to his neighbors who have no source of heat or power.
"The neighbor over here is like oh if you want to go get warm go get warm over there," said Lindsay Kaufmann who lives in Nevada City. "We check on each other because that is all we can do."
PG&E Spokesman Paul Moreno said restoring power lines in this storm has looked different.
"That is because it has impacted a lot of California, so we are not able to really lean on our utility partners down south because they have impacts of their own to deal with," said Moreno.
Crews are still going in with snow cats, snow shoes and using this break of snowfall to their advantage.
"This is allowing us to fly helicopter to reach areas we can't get by car or by foot easily," said Moreno. "With more weather coming, we are helping local crews by bringing in crews from other regions such as Bakersfield that has not been as heavily impacted."
Moreno said the areas impacted by the outages the most were east of Grass Valley, east of Nevada City and along the HWY 174 corridor. Nevada County alone has had about 15,000 PG&E customers lose power.
"With years of drought, trees are out there, but they are weakened," said Moreno. "With the extra loading of weight, it is easier for them to topple over because of their root structure that isn't as strong as a normal tree."
Moreno hopes crews will be able to restore power by Wednesday evening, but that depends on accessibility to the hundreds of damaged power poles and transformers.
"Hopefully I can get out of my driveway to the grocery store and get all the essentials," said Kaufmann. "I have to get ready for tax stuff too."
You can track the latest conditions of the outage here.
