Hollister
– Areas of Hollister lost power on Wednesday night and Thursday
afternoon. Pacific Gas and Electric spokesman Jeff Smith said the
second outage affected around 5,300 customers in the downtown
area.
Hollister – Areas of Hollister lost power on Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon. Pacific Gas and Electric spokesman Jeff Smith said the second outage affected around 5,300 customers in the downtown area.
“During the summer, equipment gets hot and a small percentage will fail,” Smith said.
The culprit behind the Thursday outage was a broken insulator in a transformer at Powell and South streets. Malfunctioning transformers are the most common cause of power outages during the summer, Smith said.
The downtown area lost power at 1:15pm Thursday, Smith said. Power was restored by 2:17pm.
Johnny’s Bar and Grill owner Charisse Tyson said she had to stop serving food, but the outage didn’t completely shut down the bar.
“We can still pour beer,” Tyson said. “We’ve kept the bar open without power for a lot longer before.”
Perishable foods in the restaurant’s refrigerators are endangered when the power goes down, but Thursday’s outage didn’t last long enough to do any real harm, Tyson said.
“We just got kind of hot in here (because the air conditioning didn’t work),” she said.
Hollister temperatures were ex-pected to reach 104 degrees Thursday.
Will Sutton, senior vice president at San Benito Bank, said the outage also caused the bank’s downtown branch to close for security reasons.
“We asked our customers to finish their transactions and leave,” he said.
San Benito Bank’s main office on Tres Pinos Road was unaffected, and the downtown branch reopened its doors shortly after the power came back up, Sutton said.
Before Thursday’s outage, Hollister residents in the Sunnyslope Village area lost power after a car struck a pole on Sunnyslope Road. Electrical power went out for 39 customers at 8:15pm Wednesday. But at 11pm, PG&E workers had to cut service for another 310 customers to complete repairs. Service resumed at 12:07am, Smith said.
