PORTLAND, Ore — Houses along Red Cedar Court in Portland's West Hills were dark Sunday morning. The families living there are just some of the hundred Oregonians who woke up Sunday morning without power after planned outages from Portland General Electric and Pacific Power.
The utility companies cut power for thousands in western Oregon on Friday due to the threat of high winds and extreme wildfire conditions. By Sunday morning, Pacific Power had said that power was restored through its service areas, with PGE saying that it was working to do the same.
However, in the West Hills, families still didn’t have power even after PGE told customers it would be back on.
“We’re all reading. It’s very prehistoric over here,” said one West Hills resident, Zahra Hannan. She said they received a notice on Thursday that power would be out for 12 hours. As of 10 a.m. on Sunday, it’s been 48 hours.
“PGE won’t give us a solid answer,” Hannan explained. “At first, they said it’s undetermined, then they said it would come on at 6 a.m., then they said 10 a.m. It’s now 10 a.m. and it’s still not on.”
Hannan said she has called PGE multiple times over the past two days.
“They were like, 'You are the 370th person who has called today,' and it’s like OK, clearly nothing’s going to happen.”
Hannan said her family wasn’t prepared for the outage to last this long.
“We had flashlights and lanterns for after the sun went down but they all ran out of power after 48 hours," she said. "I think that people in Portland aren’t prepared to deal with this type of thing ... it’s not like somewhere on the East Coast where they have crazy winter storms.”
All the food in their fridge has now gone bad. “We’re going to have to throw like half of it away now because half of it is melted.”
“I went and bought some ice and put it in the fridge and the freezer,” added Elizabeth Dailey, who lives a few doors down. She’s worried what will happen if they don’t quickly get the power back.
“We’re on a septic and it has a pump and we’ve been told the septic can go for about three days as long as you’re not doing heavy equipment — which of course we aren’t because we have no electricity — but we are getting a little nervous about showering and using the facilities,” said Dailey.
“It also just seems unfair because they said it would be to prevent the fires from coming in, but the closest fire is 80 miles away,” added Hannan.
KGW reached out to PGE early Sunday morning. PGE said the homes in this part of the Northwest Hills are in one of the 10 public safety power shutoff areas and power will only be turned back on if conditions are safe.
“I think that the electric company could give us a better explanation as to why,” said Dailey.
Neighbors said the outages don’t make sense, given that not everyone in the area is without power.
“Our neighborhood in this little bubble is without power, but everyone around us is with power so it just doesn’t make any logical sense,” said Hannan.
PGE opened five community resource centers where people affected by the outages can get supplies, access Wi-Fi and charge their phones. They will continue to update people on the status of the outages on their website and social media.
“It just sucks because when the power does eventually come back on there’s not going to be any accountability,” said Hannan.
Editor's note: PGE said it restored power to all customers impacted by the public safety power shutoff in a news release late Sunday night. The shutoff affected 37,000 customers across 17 areas.
