Power went out along First Street Saturday afternoon for about
an hour, but a PG
&
amp;E spokesperson said the utility company did have any records
of an outage.
Power went out along First Street Saturday afternoon for about an hour, but a PG&E spokesperson said the utility company did have any records of an outage.
The mysterious blackout occurred about 2:50 p.m. and lasted for an hour or so, inconveniencing many businesses and residences on either side of First Street. However, nobody seemed to know why it happened or exactly how many people it affected – not even Gilroy’s electricity supplier.
“There was not an outage in Gilroy according to our records,” which are updated every 24 hours, Spokesperson Jennifer Zerwer said Monday.
But there was, residents and business owners said. At Victoria’s Mexican Restaurant on the north side of First Street between Wren Avenue and Wayland Lane, waitress Patricia Prieto said the margaritas kept flowing even though the juice wasn’t.
“We just waited it out like we always do,” Prieto said, adding that the restaurant can run up to six hours without power as long as employees are conservative when opening refrigerators.
A back-up generator at Safeway down the block ensured the grocery store’s goods stayed fresh, but many of the lights turned off, according to a manager there. Employees at Blockbuster across the street weathered a much briefer, 10-minute outage by renting videos to customers manually, and one employee said he returned to his home on Wren Avenue Saturday evening to find all his clocks blinking twelve o’clock.
Carla Ruigh, Gilroy’s operation services manager, wrote in an e-mail Monday that she had not heard any reports of an outage.
