Eureka Winter Formal rescued thanks to PG&E crews

A night to remember almost became a night that was almost forgotten. A tree came down on Buhne and Harrison streets, bringing down lines in the area.

That led to 2,500 customers having no power in Eureka. Power was soon rerouted, leaving only more than 900 customers without power.

“One of them included the high school, which has winter formal tonight, and the school called us and asked if there was any help that they could do,” PG&E’s division operations specialist, Mike Crafton, said.

Eureka High School’s winter formal is an event that the students have been waiting for, ready to brave the weather to attend.

But as the storm reared its ugly head, the formal had to be canceled due to the loss of power.

Luckily for Eureka High and the students, PG&E was already nearby to come to their aid.

“You can see behind me, it’s an army of crews that are getting this stuff up pretty quick. And on top of that, with the winter storm that was coming in, we had a lot of equipment staged, so we had an extra temporary generation that we were able to take over to the school just in case this doesn’t get up in power,” Crafton said.

Events can rely on temporary generators to help keep events running smoothly. They can also provide much-needed aid to shelters and other important facilities.

“The power from one of those generators can pretty much last indefinitely. We have somebody that goes out and refuels them when they start running out of power. Like in the last storm, over in the Point Arena Gualla area, those generators had to last for four to five days for some of the warming centers that were out there,” Crafton said.

After ensuring that the event would go off without a hitch, Crafton and crew are happy to give back to the community.

“This is one of the momentous occasions in high school that they are going to remember for the rest of their life and we saw how devastated they were. It choked up a lot of us in the operations just because we were able to pull this off and make this happen for the kids in the high school,” Crafton said.