Until Friday evening, some elderly residents of Silver Shores Mobile Home Park in south Everett were shivering in 40-degree darkness and eating cold soup.
About a quarter of the park’s 100 homes were without power for almost three days, since early Wednesday morning, said Cliff Muzzy, who manages the park with his wife, Sharon.
"One resident, she had six layers of blankets, cooked on a wood stove and used candles," Cliff Muzzy said. "These are little old ladies, mostly single, who live in the city and don’t expect to be without power for three days."
So residents of the mobile home park on Silver Lake Road were particularly grateful to the Snohomish County PUD crews who showed up Friday evening to restore their power, but "not quite happy" with PUD management, who never got back to Muzzy about the seniors without power.
After crews arrived Friday, it took them only about 30 minutes to fix blown fuses in a nearby transformer, Muzzy said.
Snohomish resident Jeff Rogers, another a victim of the isolated outages, got his power back Friday morning.
"I kept on calling our friends at the PUD, and nobody was willing to give me any information," Rogers said. "It would be nice to know when they’ve got you slated and when you’re likely to go on line."
He, too, credited the field crews for a job well done, but said he wished management would have been more forthcoming.
"We were literally in the dark and figuratively in the dark about getting information," Rogers said. "They have a pattern to how they’re doing this … that’s fine. Just so we have some understanding of when we can expect it."
PUD spokesman Neil Neroutsos sympathized with the frustrations. The sheer volume of power outages has kept crews working around the clock to restore power since Wednesday’s ice storm, he said.
Neroutsos said the PUD’s first priority this week was to work on lines that would restore power to the largest groups of residents and businesses, and then work on the smaller outages.
By today, the PUD’s goal was to have power restored to the remaining 200 or so customers without it, he said.
What remained to be restored Friday were downed or damaged lines that each serve a handful of customers — lines going to one neighborhood or even one home.
"It’s been a real challenging one for us," Neroutsos said.
Muzzy said some of the mobile home park’s seniors stayed with family and friends during the outage, and others who could afford to do so went to motels.
But some, including a 93-year-old resident, couldn’t leave or didn’t want to because they felt safer in their own homes or didn’t want to leave their pets.
Resident Michael Johnson said he and his wife ate cold soup out of cans and threw an extra comforter on the bed.
Temperatures in some trailers got down to the 40s, Muzzy said.
With his power back on, Snohomish resident Rogers was able to find a good side to the ordeal. A few days in the dark helped him appreciate conveniences that most Americans take for granted.
"It made me think of Iraq," he said. "They haven’t had power probably for months. You get a better appreciation after things like this."
Reporter Jennifer Warnick: 425-339-3429 or
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