PGE in final repair stages
Monday marked the ninth or tenth day for more than 4,000 Salem area residents still grappling with the loss of power following the ice storms over President’s Day weekend.
About 400 crews from Portland General Electric tackled another 14,000 power restorations Sunday and Monday morning, leaving about 24,000 overall still without power in the Willamette Valley.
Lineworkers are in their final stages of repairing damage that will restore power at about 6,000 locations, PGE officials said during a Monday news conference. Many of the remaining customers are those living in clusters where a small number of households are affected.
Northeast Salem resident Carole Engen is one such customer.
Engen, her husband and two cats live on a private road among 10 houses in the Fruitland area.
The neighborhoods surrounding their street have power; she and her neighbors don’t.
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Monday marked the family’s tenth day without power.
PGE workers are prioritizing areas where they can restore power to a larger number of customers at one time — as well as areas with severe damage — before getting to the smaller groups, said Dale Goodman, director of utility operations for PGE.
But officials did not provide further estimates on when crews would complete restoration.
“As we take two steps forward, mother nature pushes us back,” PGE president and CEO Maria Pope said Monday, pointing to a wind event in Tualatin and Tigard that caused additional customers to lose power Sunday night.
“Our crews are exhausted, but …. our work is important and we will not stop working 24/7 until we get every customer’s power restored,” Pope said.
Engen and her husband have been living in the family room where they sleep on an air mattress next to a wood stove to keep warm. Engen’s day sometimes starts as early as 2 a.m. to make sure they still have firewood burning through the night.
The family uses the stove to boil water and cook, but they have mostly been spending money on takeout. She said her neighbor, who has a generator, has let the couple fill buckets of water through a long hose that runs from the neighbor’s spigot in their yard.
Engen has continued to go to work through the outage but often ends her day early to be with her husband at home.
“You think differently,” she said. “Your day is by light. It’s dreary.”
Engen and her husband are frustrated at the lack of communication and outreach from PGE.
The last restoration update she received from the company was an estimate of 6 p.m.on Feb. 17. They’ve now stopped giving estimates, she said.
“It’s a brick wall,” she said. “They’ve got us grouped in this hazard area. But we’re not … you can literally see the line that’s down.
“I understand we’re going to have storms and these things are going to happen,” she added. “We need to learn from them and how we can better serve the needs of the customer base.”
Misty Berry and her family are in a similar situation.
While the vast majority of their neighborhood in northeast Salem had their power restored by Feb. 14, the Berrys are among four or five households still sitting in darkness.
When Berry spoke to PGE officials on Saturday, she was told their outage could last another four to five days and they would likely be one of the last repairs because of the small number of outages in their group.
More unsettling to Berry was hearing linemen tell her they were “confused” as to the cause of outages in her neighborhood.
“I would like PGE to be more transparent but … it is what it is, “she said. “And we’re kind of stuck dealing with it at this point. Hopefully, everyone will be able to get this figured out so if it does happen in the future, it’ll be better dealt with.”
Berry, who lives with her husband and three daughters said the most challenging part has been trying to stay warm.
“Some days it’s been colder in my house than it’s been outside,” she said.
She estimates they’ve lost somewhere between $300 and $400 worth of groceries and have spent an additional $200 on takeout meals and snacks to make it through the week.
Still, there are silver linings, she said.
“We’ve been doing a lot of reading … and a lot of talking,” she said. ” I’ve been able to have more communication with my daughters than I’ve had in a while.”
Virginia Barreda is the breaking news and public safety reporter for the Statesman Journal. She can be reached at 503-399-6657 or at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @vbarreda2.
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