Thousands of South Bay residents deal with extended outages after latest storm
CUPERTINO – Tens of thousands of homes in the South Bay were without power on Wednesday, after intense winds from Tuesday's atmospheric river storm knocked the power out.
In Cupertino, Bob Brown's power went out on Tuesday around noon and didn't get restored until Wednesday afternoon.
He bought a generator on Wednesday morning, because at that point, his power had been out for a day and it appeared it wasn't going to come back on until Thursday.
"I've got my freezer packed with frozen food and I'm afraid it's not going to be frozen much longer, so that's why I got this generator," he said.
However, power was restored in his neighborhood shortly after he was able to assemble his generator.
"I got my refrigerator on, that's the most important thing," he said.
Brown has lived in Cupertino since the early 2000's, and says he's never experienced an outage that lasted as long as this one did.
However, he says considering the nature of the weather and the amount of people who were affected by the outages, he doesn't have a bone to pick with PG&E.
"Well, it's understandable. As I mentioned, I used to be in emergency management, and I understand to some extent what they have to go through to get the power restored," he said.
While power in his neighborhood has been restored, there are neighborhoods all throughout the South Bay that were still in the dark Wednesday evening.
As of 5:15 p.m. Wednesday the utility said there were nearly 100,000 Bay Area customers without power. That was down from the 300,000 during the height of the storm on Tuesday.
The bulk of the outages remain in the South Bay, where 60,260 customers were without electricity.
Some may remain without power through Thursday, potentially Friday, according to estimates on PG&E's outage maps.
