Coronavirus: Arcadia neighborhood outraged over Edison's planned power outage amid stay-at-home orders
ARCADIA, Calif. (KABC) -- With so many California residents working from home and their refrigerators stocked amid the coronavirus emergency, now is perhaps not an ideal time for a planned power outage.
That's the message that homeowners and officials in two local cities are sending to Southern California Edison.
On quiet Oakwood Street in Arcadia this week, residents were outraged when they saw orange traffic cones lining part of the roadway and Edison crews just around the corner.
"It was going to happen today," Catherine Cuellar, who lives nearby, told ABC7 on Friday.
Cuellar said the utility company was going to move forward with planned power outages. Residents received notices that their service could be shut down for most of the day.
Gov. Gavin Newsom had issued a statewide stay-at-home order on Thursday.
"People have nowhere to go," Cuellar said. "There's elderly people, people that have finally stocked up the refrigerators.
"They could've been a little more considerate."
Upset residents called the city of Arcadia. Officials said they canceled the city permits.
"As a result, our engineer let the contractor know earlier today that we would not be issuing the permit for this work," said an email sent to residents on Thursday. "So, they are not permitted to do this project tomorrow."
Resident Hanna Kefalas said, "In the state of emergency that we're in, it would've been nice just be considerate of our feelings I guess."
The city of Monrovia had a similar issue.
"Many times, we had requested for planned outages to be postponed," the city manager, Dylan Feik, said in a statement. "On the day two outages were to happen and no postponement confirmation from Edison, I directed staff to revoke the encroachment permit and stop work."
Edison did not respond to ABC7's request for comment.
