Residents in the Santa Cruz mountains are fed up with continual unscheduled power outages that have been plaguing their community.
It’s been a long and frustrating road for locals who have been left in the dark for hours at a time. In the past two weeks, there have been seven outages alone.
The problem lies with PG&E's safety system to prevent wildfires as it can be tripped by things like a branch or a squirrel, immediately cutting power to the entire community. The utility company has promised to fine tune the system so that it will affect a smaller area when there is an outage, but residents aren’t convinced.
"We’ve lived here our whole lives, PG&E has been basically unreliable for most of that time," a Santa Cruz woman told KCBS Radio. "They will say things and then it doesn’t happen."
At this point, residents said they are just "used to things happening" and having to deal with those things without the help of PG&E. "Look at all the wildfires caused by their lines," one man said. "Have they fixed it yet? No."
PG&E intends on undergrounding 10,000 miles of power lines in California to mitigate wildfire risk, but hasn’t said when that plan will be put into action.
Related
