JENKS, Okla. — Jenks residents are voicing concerns, as numerous power outages have been reported recently due to animal and equipment failures.
Scrolling through Facebook, there was a lot of chatter about power outages disrupting homes and businesses.
2 News was told these spontaneous power outages last anywhere from five minutes to several hours, which is causing some concern as temperatures drop and the holidays approach.
"Our house is totally electric. You start trying to cook a turkey, what are you going to do when you lose power right? We may all be going out to eat," said Jenks resident and business owner Mike Guillen.
He said the outages have impacted his businesses and home, making it difficult to get things done when the electricity is out.
"It just literally makes work impossible because today everything is phone and internet, and when you don’t have that you have nothing. That makes it really tough," said Guillen.
He said the outages have increased over the past few weeks. But one of the challenges is not just the outage it's not knowing why it's happening.
He’s not the only one concerned. Numerous other Jenks residents took to social media.
Guillen said while larger stores may have generators to keep them going, local stores like his on Main St. don't, forcing them to stop operations.
"The shops here on Main Street don’t have it, right? This is a big deal, especially with all the new stuff happening. If you lose power to a restaurant, you just lose business for the day," said Guillen.
After seeing increased concern, the Public Service Company of Oklahoma also took to Facebook. It said squirrels and other animals are one of the causes of the outages.
As 2 News was driving out of Jenks to meet with PSO a crew was working on a nearby powerline.
The outages are not limited to just the animals. PSO said it had a failure in a transmitter that also caused some of the problems.
"As far as some of the outages that have happened over the last week or two we’ve identified things that we are going to fix, we’ve adjusted and reset some of our settings on our equipment, to mitigate some of the issues that we have been seeing so hopefully those won’t happen in the future," said Matt Rahn the spokesperson for PSO.
He said PSO will be driving around Jenks updating areas and looking for any problems that could cause outages.
They hope this eases some of the power outages, especially as the holidays roll around.
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