Throughout Monday morning, thousands of CPS Energy customers were without power due to the effects of wind and rain. At one point, an outage on the city’s Southwest Side affected nearly 1,000 customers.
Within a one-mile radius of the 300 block of Vincent St near Loop 410 South and Highway 16, 995 CPS Energy customers first reported an outage just after 5:00 Monday morning.
“I call and they say that they can’t do nothing, that (it is) something about the weather,” Clara Zepeda said.
Zepeda and her husband have lived on Vincent St for more than 40 years. After hours of waiting for electricity to be restored, they tried to keep cool on their porch.
“(There has) been worse weather and this never happens,” Zepeda said. “I mean, when something happens, they fix it in one, two hours, you know?”
According to Zepeda and her neighbors, the biggest concern was groceries spoiling.
“I have four freezers and (the food is) going to go to waste,” Zepeda said. “I mean, it’s already (been) seven hours, and I was checking on one and it’s already like defrosting.”
Power was finally restored to that neighborhood right before 1:00 PM. According to an email from CPS Energy, the outage was due to a down power line. “Before finding the power line down, we had to troubleshoot the circuit and restore as many customers as we could,” a representative with CPS said.
Although thankful the power was finally restored, Zepeda and her neighbors fear going through the same thing Monday evening if severe storms strike.