While the Bay Area saw some sunshine on Friday, thousands of people in the region were still without power following the latest batch of storms. Alyssa Goard reports.
While the Bay Area saw some sunshine on Friday, thousands of people in the region were still without power following the latest batch of storms.
As of Friday afternoon, PG&E said 7,213 of it's Bay Area customers were without power. The region which saw the most of these outages was the South Bay which 4,022 customers without power Friday afternoon.
However, additional outages appeared to continue into Friday evening. While PG&E's outage map showed an outage in San Jose and Saratoga impacting 32,000 Friday evening, a PG&E spokesperson told NBC Bay Area that this was an error on the map and that the outage impacted 654 people. PG&E said it is investigating the cause of the outage Friday night in the South Bay.
PG&E says the latest storm was very destructive in the South Bay. While the utility has made while progress in getting the lights back on for the more than 140,000 customers without power earlier this week, it's been a frustrating and confusing time for customers still in the dark.
Just off of Summit Road in Los Gatos, the peaceful sounds of the Santa Cruz mountains are interrupted by the hum of generators.
“You have a whole community here that doesn’t have power,” explained Julian Hawkins who lived there. Hawkins said earlier in the week thousands of people in the area were without power. As of Friday evening, more than 150 PG&E customers near Summit Road were listed as being without power.
A group of neighbors met NBC Bay Area there, explaining they've been in the dark for the past four days and a total of twenty days this year.
"For me and my wife, we have a generator, we've invested in solar to cope with this, there are other people here that don’t have the money to do that,” Hawkins noted, explaining that this is outage is especially difficult for his neighbors who are elderly or have medical issues.
NBC Bay Area reached out to PG&E to ask why the outage had not been resolved yet, we did not receive a response.
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But the PG&E website estimates that power will be restored in that area by 10:00 p.m. on Saturday. In a statement earlier in the day on Friday, PG&E said it expects the "vast majority of customers" to have power restored by the end of the day Saturday.
