Silicon Valley Power (SVP) or its employees get a much needed reprieve from the rain after today. Crews have worked around the clock to restore power to the thousands of people impacted by downed power lines and blown transformers. On Wednesday morning, the utility happily declared that power was restored to all customers.
Crews worked long hours in wet weather to deal with the damage caused by the weekend storms.
According to Santa Clara’s Chief Public Information Officer Janine De la Vega, there were more than 20 outages citywide, affecting approximately 20,000 customers. The sheer number of issues, coupled with the continued storm, hampered the progress of the normally speedy SVP.
“The quantity of power outages at the same time due to the severity of the wind was a major challenge. Field crews and supporting staff worked around the clock to restore power,” said De la Vega. “Our Public Works Department was also busy. Our crews responded to 92 calls for service involving trees.”
While rain is in the forecast for Wednesday, the following days are expected to be dry with light winds. That will give SVP time to rest and regroup.
“As with most City responses of this nature, staff came together afterwards for a debrief to ensure that the City remains prepared for events like this,” said De la Vega. “We see this debrief as a learning opportunity to evaluate how we can continue to best serve our community.”
SVP has good experience with these situations already. Last winter year around this time, SVP dealt with a different round of storms, restoring power just as quickly.
Santa Clara’s power utility wasn’t the only one scrambling to get power restored in less than ideal conditions. Tens of thousands of PG&E customers across the state lost power and some still don’t have it.
To track current power outages in Santa Clara, visit SVP’s website at www.siliconvalleypower.com and search “Outages.”
Here is the direct address for the outage map.
.
https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-community/outages-and-alerts/current-outages
Thank you SVP for restoring our power. Ours was out 24 hours. What was difficult this time was the surprising lack of communication or news by SVP to residents about what was going on and when power would be back on. With no power even cell phone reception was very weak (1 bar) for some reason so we couldn’t get any info except for anecdotal comments on the Ring app or text messages with neighbors in Santa Clara. SVP website and calling in and getting only a recorded message with no info was not helpful and disappointing. Felt a little deserted by SVP. If you give updates we’d be able to get (expensive) refrigerated food into ice chests and to take other measures to prepare for no heat or light. Maybe an opportunity for SVP to develop better communication emergency procedures for their customers.