GREGORY, Texas — Recently, residents across Gregory have noticed an issue; power loss, and it has been happening frequently.
“It’s like nearly every day that we’re getting the power loss,” said resident Lydia Sotello.
Sotello has lived in Gregory her whole life, more than 80 years. She said she’s noticed it becoming more frequent over the last few months, and doesn’t know why the power outages have been occurring.
“We really don’t know what’s going on in this town,” she said.
Sotello is not alone. Jessica Ortiz said she has counted ten power outages in her home since Thanksgiving.
“Right as when the Cowboys game was going to start is when the power went out, and it was well past halftime when the power came back on,” Ortiz said.
Ortiz said luckily her family was able to finish cooking Thanksgiving dinner before the power went out, but they had to eat in the dark.
Both Sotello and Ortiz are worried about the issues persisting through the winter. As temperatures drop, they do not want a repeat of what happened last year during the February freeze.
“I don’t want to be in the same situation like last year, I don’t want to be stuck with no power for days and days,” Ortiz said.
“I invested in a generator, because I don’t want to go through what we went through last year, in February,” Sotello said. “We went through a lot last year, and this year, I’m not going to take a chance not having something to keep me going.”
Residents are not the only ones experiencing issues. Restaurant Sarcastic Susie’s has also experienced several outages, and even had to close two days last week because of them.
“We lost a lot of business, both days, and it’s a nuisance,” said owner Angela Saenz Arevalo. “We’re just a little mom and pop restaurant. We have to just turn customers away, which is unfortunate, but what do we do?”
Arevalo also said they had to throw out food that went bad during the power outage.
“We can’t serve our customers food that’s been sitting in the fridge with no power, so we lost a lot of product as well,” she said.
Residents have speculated on what is causing the issues, but do not know exactly what the problem is.
“Some people are saying it’s because the city is growing, but Portland has grown more, and I don’t think they’re going through this problem that we are,” Sotello said.
“We understand when there’s issues. We understand when a tree falls and the power goes out, but there are times where we’re losing power twice in one day,” Ortiz said. “We’re not getting any information back, we don’t know what’s going on.”
“We still don’t have answers. I’ve contacted AEP, other residents as well, we’re just waiting to hear back,” Arevalo said.
KRIS 6 News reached out to AEP about this issue, they said they are working on finding out if there is an issue in Gregory, but did not have further comment on the matter.
