PORTLAND, Oregon — It has been a long week of ice, snow and power outages in the Portland area. For some families, the outages have lasted almost a week.
KGW spoke with the Fordice family in Cedar Mill on Friday morning. They first lost power on Saturday, Jan. 13 and have been without ever since.
"We are on day six, no power. Our house is flooded because the sump pump isn't working, and there is no communication, no clear communication on what exactly is going on," Michele Fordice said.
The family of five has had to make do the best they can, cooking meals on their gas stove, and huddling around their gas-powered fireplace.
"We have our down moments where we are pretty frustrated and ready for this to be over, and then we have our moments when we are laughing and trying to encourage each other ... but yeah, it's been rough,” said Jay Fordice.
The parents were frustrated with the lack on communication from PGE on when their power might be restored. Michele said that they also encountered challenges explaining the situation to their children.
"Every day it's new information and it just feels like, as a parent, that we don't know how to parent them, we don't know how to help them or coach them along emotionally with all of this," Michele said. "And we have already gone through COVID already, it feels like COVID all over again."
The family did inform KGW that their power was finally restored during the early afternoon hours on Friday. But the damage caused by flooding in their basement will cause the headaches of this winter storm to continue.
"Our basement is our master bedroom, our bathroom and our laundry room, so that means we have no place to sleep, it means we have no place to do our laundry," explained Michele. "It's going to be really uncomfortable for a while and we don't know how long it's going to take for insurance to kick in."