Residents of Rancho Santa Barbara mobile home park say they were left scrambling after losing power without warning on one of the hottest days of the year.
The 450 residents experienced a planned outage that began at 10:30 a.m. Friday morning, according to Southern California Edison, for planned repair work to a power pole near the community.
"Because I didn't know about this power outage, I kept saying every hour, you know, it's going to come back on, it's going to come back, and by 7:00 at night, I was panicked," said resident Barbara Scott.
The outage came as a complete surprise to residents, who said they received no advance notice of the planned work before Friday's temperature rose to 91 degrees in Santa Barbara, creating uncomfortable and potentially dangerous conditions for residents.
"We weren't informed. That was the biggest thing. I wasn't able to get ice to save my food," said one resident.
The power remained off for nearly 24 hours, creating serious health risks for some residents.
"My husband, who is on a CPAP machine every night for his sleep apnea, was unable to do that, so I had to watch him through the night so that he didn't suffer an episode that could have been fatal," said resident Marguerite Fournier.
The failure to notify residents stemmed from a communication breakdown. Because the mobile home park operates on a master meter system, SCE sends outage notices only to the master account holder, who is then responsible for informing residents with sub-meters.
SCE said it sent three digital notices to the account owner on August 11, 21, and 22, notifying them of the planned outage. However, park management says they only received a notice on Aug. 21, and that notification went to their junk email folder and was missed.
"Usually the management is pretty attentive, but in this case, it was worst-case scenario," Fournier said.
Property management said in a written statement that it has updated contact information with SCE and notifications will now go directly to the property manager. The company is also looking into purchasing a generator to power a cooling center at the clubhouse for future outages.
